David Torn Rips It Up and Starts Again 

Did David Torn steal Lou Reed’s band? Probably not—the members of Torn’s early 1980s fusion ensemble Everyman Band, who released two albums on the storied ECM label, have all played with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal during in the late ’70s, but Reed had a notoriously mercurial relationship to personnel. Still, a budding jazz guitarist (Torn was mentored by pioneering trumpeter Don Cherry) joining forces with a rock icon’s sidemen for his recording debut shows a strong independent streak and no small amount of ambition. In the four decades since, Torn has delivered on that promise, producing a bewildering wealth of expansive music, from “arrogant ambient” (his term) to EDM (under the alias Splattercell) to acid jazz (check out his work with saxophonist Tim Berne) and working with a staggering array of musicians, including David Bowie, King Crimson’s Tony Levin, Tori Amos, k.d. lang, John Legend, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The list goes on. 

On his latest album, now I imagine a place not the same, Torn works alone, as he did on 2015’s Only Sky. But whereas that excellent album focused on Torn’s turbulent loop-based ambience, imagine showcases Torn’s tactility. Torn’s rich feedback atmospheres and ozone-layer tones are still present, but they’re not the whole show. Now, they support gnarled lines and exploratory chords. Torn recently opened for transcendental drone purveyors Sunn O))), and longtime Sunn collaborator Randall Dunn produced imagine. The album artwork, depicting an extraterrestrial landscape and a glowing door, cosmic song titles like “shapes of newborn warming stars” and opening track “ice-cold shock of illusion,” which features long, buzzing notes and carefully contoured feedback, suggests that Torn could be aligning himself with the new generation of six-string mystics that he helped inspire. 

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But imagine is far more than a sonic elder (Torn just turned 73) proving that he can keep up with times. Over 11 brooding, combustible, emotive songs, Torn maps whole universes of electric guitar: dryly picked, harmonic-filled pastorals like “inconclusive,” bluesy, warping fugues like “its own dimension,” spectral symphonies like “when the birds flock ’round my head.” Sometimes, Torn appears to reference fellow travelers—”the road (past the beehive) to the river” invokes in both its title and its air of imminent revelation the ominous meditations of Earth, while the epic, 11-minute “bones of home, fly east…” has the smoldering crackle of Sleep, slowed down, spaced out, and filled up. In addition to his solo and band material, Torn has had a long career working in movies, scoring films like Lars and the Real Girl and The Order. He brings some of cinema’s detailed world-building and precise design to imagine, making his abstract improvisations and fluid compositions into continually surprising, always evolving and dazzlingly complete pocket universes. Nearly a half-century into his career, David Torn is still breaking things down and making them new.

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Did David Torn steal Lou Reed’s band? Probably not—the members of Torn’s early 1980s fusion ensemble Everyman Band, who released two albums on the storied ECM label, have all played with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal during in the late ’70s, but Reed had a notoriously mercurial relationship to personnel. Still, a budding jazz guitarist […]Reed Jackson{authorlink}https://www.spinmagazine.com/feed/SPINMusic News, Album Reviews, Concert Photos, Videos and Morehttps://static.spinmagazine.com/files/2023/08/cropped-logo-spin-s-340×340.png