And now we pare it down to just the guitar. Longtime Ball of Wax friend Andrew Weathers beamed in this transmission, recorded live at Stanford’s mighty KZSU, from his newish home in Littlefield, Texas. Iit builds slowly, as longer works often do, with a repeated arpeggio played on a twangy electric guitar, slowly bringing in lower notes, a pulsing chord, then moving up and down the fretboard a little to toy with some melodic ideas before drawing back, giving us room to breathe, and then launching again into arrhythmic runs, arpeggios, and occasional bursts of dissonance – maybe a little Fahey, a little Ribot, but all Weathers.
Maybe it’s just me, but these 10-minute songs are starting to go by in a flash. Before we know it, Andrew and his guitar are tumbling down a hill together toward the end and I don’t know what it means, but it sounds a lot like “walk backwards a lightning, rattle down the sky.”