[iron mitchell]

Davenport - The Hands Of Worm Heaven

h!!p://s51.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2G3884UL5H02208JNOT1KOIZE9

"To celebrate their last CDR release, Davenport does The Hands of Worm Heaven up right. It receives deluxe treatment—lavish artwork featuring 8 disturbing original drawings by Dylan Nyoukis on thick manila art paper, a nearly eighty-minute run-time, and an edition of 223 that, while still limited, doubles that of most of their releases.
The eight tracks are super-sized as well. You’ll be hard-pressed to find one shorter than ten minutes here, and Davenport can make even ten minutes sound like a fragment. They feel most comfortable around the fifteen-to-twenty-minute mark, as evidenced by their fondness for single-tracks 3” CDRs.
Davenport can’t cut it short—their greatest strength is longevity. Often they don’t seem to know what they’re doing within the first couple minutes. You hear the sounds of stereos being turned off, musicians shuffling around and coughing, instruments being tinkered with, and themes being hesitantly tested. But once they settle, they lock into a groove that seduces the patient listener.
This approach to recording might annoy some—why pay to hear someone’s warm-up?—but by bypassing the sterility of the professional take for amateur-in-your-midst intimacy, Davenport grounds their improvisations. Their music sounds familiar and alive, like something you could hear in your neighborhood if only you knew the address of those bongo-toting dreadlocked guys always biking down your street.
This homespun accessibility enhances their work. Davenport doesn’t seem to be a collective of musicians, but a gaggle of people making music. Certainly we expect musicians to make beautiful noise, but when Davenport does what they do so well, one is awed by the human capacity to channel inspiration at the drop of a hat. Davenport charges on the front lines of a Democratic Movement for Music, dismantling our notion—so encouraged by an industry that emphasizes the product and alienates us from the music’s ephemeral nature—that music results from specialized labor rather than a basic human drive.
If I’ve given the impression that Davenport, can’t play, I apologize. One need only hear Hands of Worm Heaven to realize that these folks aren’t new to their instruments. But they certainly don’t get by on chops alone. That just isn’t the point. Their sound is too rough-edged to please a listener technically. But with their unhinged vocal spasms, bang-on-what-ya-got percussion, asleep-on-the-sitar drones, and rambunctious tape experiments, they sure as hell please me.
On this album, “Sheep Meadow Invocation #5” best represents Davenport. Upon first listen, I was put off by its similarity to “Sheep Meadow Invocation #3” from their recent Field Tales. The blueprint is the same: cat yowl vocals, hand-bell blowouts, and bah-bah pasture sounds. Once you’ve heard one Sheep Meadow Invocation, you’ve heard ’em all, right? But upon further inspection, the similarities were too persistent and conspicuous to be the product of a band covering itself. The formula must be reversed: once you’ve heard all the Sheep Meadow Invocations, you’ve heard the One. This is a far more intriguing proposition. It suggests a group not bound by limited studio time, marketability, or format. Davenport doesn’t perform for the sake of a recording; they record for the sake of the performance. They must document their musical transformations; otherwise by the time they stop to think about what they’ve been, they’ll have evolved into something new. But recording is a limitation—an artificial segmentation of a fluid whole.
And “Sheep Meadow Invocation #5” isn’t even the best song on this release. That honor goes to either the electrified drone of “Serpents Come Here” or the tangle-haired epic “The Spells We Know.”
If this seems like a dissertation, don’t worry. Davenport doesn’t want to burden you with concept, though concept does lurk, unspoken and in need of elucidation. Davenport just wants to bring music to life. If a recording kills it, at least it’s still fresh. A Davenport track is bleeding raw compared to our overcooked pop landscape. Take some comfort in the fact that most of us simply can’t see Davenport in their element. We wouldn’t just have to catch them live—we’d have to catch them at home." -Bryan Berge