Ava Mendoza – The Circular Train LP

Description:

Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her second solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barrplus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutts quartetthe guitarists name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitars possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down.

This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendozas thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rocknroll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill. Conceptually, The Circular Train is presented as a psychogeographical train ride through certain of Mendozas musical homelands. The songs draw on ancestral and recent familial memories, notably of her parents roots in mining townsin her fathers home country of Bolivia and mothers hometown of Butte, Montana, each country with its own history of colonialism, racism, forced labor, the eradication of culture and the subsequent excavation of it.

These adventurous songs were composed in cars and planes, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in Los Angeles and upstate New Yorkwhich is to say in motion. Ride to Cerro Rico, named for the mountain and silver mine at the center of Potosi, Bolivia, was inspired by Mendozas great grandmothers life there in a Quechua mining family. Dust From the Mines drew from that history as well as Mendozas familial lineage of miners in Montana, building up to stunning swaths of shredded iridescence. Pink River Dolphins was inspired by a visit to the Amazon rainforest, swimming with dolphins alongside her fatherthe pink bufeos that inhabit both Bolivia and Columbiaand the song is dedicated to the memory of Mendozas late friend, the Colombian-American trumpeter jaimie branch. They shared a fascination with those intelligent and agile creatures who often communicate by echolocation. Make a sound, it comes back around, Mendoza sings, and later, Echo, echo/The answer in a sound, evoking what branch knew well: through music we navigate life.

The Circular Train contains one cover, Irene, Goodnight, composed by Gussie Lord Davis and popularized by Leadbelly; Mendoza has been performing it for over 20 years. Almost as deeply embedded in her repertoire is the penultimate track, The Shadow Song. Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you good, Mendoza sings on this song that shes been reworking for over a decade, an emblem of devotion. Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you right, she repeats, becoming a blues mantra. What is a shadow self if not ones secret world, which, once laid bare, awaits an echo, a return?