From Quagmire - Caught in Unknowing
(VHF)
Caught in Unknowing is the second album by this trio of guitar, violin, and percussion. Sparse sounds populate the music, a watercolor painting in musical form: copious use of pastels, soft colors, and shapes, and blurred lines where paint has soaked into the paper, past the bounds of the brushstroke. From Quagmire's instrumental musings are constructed with the simple, rarely shifting strumming of Dorothy Geller's acoustic guitar. James Wolf, on violin, stays more to the background, bowing thin lines of sound that can seem almost hesitant; wispy and wavy, his contributions sometimes seem to disappear softly without ever coming to the foreground. At its best, however, Wolf's drawn-out bowing adds exactly the dreamy quality that is needed to propel Geller's guitar from mundane toward entrancing. Percussionist VvGg is often far more a support player with less of an obvious impact. His bowed cymbals mix too easily with Wolf's violin, and he rarely adds more than a few scattered clangs to the songs. When he finally arouses a flourish from his drums and cymbals, it sounds jarring and out of place. Surprisingly, however, Caught in Unknowing often works. It mines moments of simple beauty and clarity, and the amount of assuredness and patience that the trio shows can be striking. Geller's vocals, when they arise, tentative and carefully measured, are well balanced with the music, and meld well when Geller's voice is as disconnected and nonlinear as the group's instruments. When she begins to develop too much of a distinctive melody, however, Caught In Unknowing is brought back to earth and loses some of its fanciful appeal. There's something in From Quagmire's music that evokes a wild, untouched forest, overgrown and abundant in all types of foliage. There's a sense that this music may parallel nature in some unspoken way that's beyond mimicry or the simple musical eco-sermons that could be more easily created, and it's when the trio are closest to this feeling that Caught in Unknowing is at its best.
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