A Shaw Deal is a new collaboration between Geologist & D.S. who are Animal Collective's Brian Weitz and Gang Gang Dance's Sleepy Doug Shaw. Geologist has looped and edited and fed through modular synths a variety of snippets of Doug Shaw's string work to create an otherworldly space to allow that Shaw Deal to go through, so listeners can imagine situations based on the music's titles.
The album opens with the clattering intensity of Route 9 Falls a persistent droning noise has strings resolutely driving onwards, eventually seeming to calm down a touch, they go past those never-ending falls.
Wit Of The Watermen has a cut up feel, shards of sound being cut into slices to be presented to our ears by the Watermen, stubbed effusions of sound, hands across strings, without looking for weird ambiences in the gloom of the canal he's floating up.
Ripper Called like a somnambulist drifting through The Flowery, searching out ladies with bustles to hustle and shiv, with dastardly delight, scraped across the cobbles.
Loose Gravel waiting to be made into Musique Concrete, oscillations from other strains of mittel European experimentalism, declining entry into the cement mixer, preferring the modular mixer instead. Spreading that loose mix with strings weird tonalities.
Petticoat takes them back to the East End down the lane, making early morning sounds, not quite like barrows clacking over cobbles, but more reworking of the Jellied Eels being mixed in that gelatine stock, while the cobbler hits that sole to get those Blakey's in.
Knuckles To Nostrils and it's all kicked off again, some toe rag has half inched some shoes and is on the run through to Brick Lane, with a metronomic beat he cuts through alleys, breweries and into the Chicksand rookery for relief.
Avarice (edit) they have slipped a few hundred yards west into the belly of the city of mammon, sounding like they are at organ practice at Austin Friars, only the tuner hasn't left and is adjusting the pipes and flues while they play.
The unlisted bonus track appears to be the various strummings and improvisations that have been looped and tweaked on the album, so you can mix them at home yourself, into your own Geologist & D.S. Tune, these are some cool samples to slip into other mixes and tunes that nevertheless have a chilled out backroom session feel.
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