(2020) Matthew De Gennaro - Laughing Lost in the Underground



Review:
Matthew De Gennaro’s music has always evoked a sense of apartness. He’s made most of it either alone or with the assistance of characters such as Scott Tuma and Alastair Galbraith, like-minded musicians who similarly stand apart. But he made most of those recordings within commuting distance of Detroit, or in museums situated within major population centers of New Zealand; Laughing Lost in the Underground was recorded in Flint Hills, Kansas, which is a fair bit further from any likely audience or accompanist. Maybe it doesn’t matter where he’s at. “We are our own audience,” notes the poem enclosed within this LP. This is music made to please its maker, and while he’s likely pleased if you like it too, that’s not why he made it. Both the tools he has employed — besides guitar, piano, and harmonica, he favors viola da gamba and clavioline — and the disparate influences he’s revealed — Renaissance string music, Kenyan fingerpicking, and the work of his close buddies — point to the idea that a quest for personal satisfaction, not a need to please, is at work here. But perhaps that remoteness has something to do with his choice, on a number of the LP’s tracks, to create virtual ensemble performances. But it’s easy to imagine “Will and Wishes,” with its automated, castanet-like beat, high-pitched whistle, and patiently executed guitar and piano harmonies, being fashioned so that De Gennaro could dance as he pleases at his own house party. The layers of strings and keyboards on “Thoughts in Exile” create a facsimile of company that might assuage a refugee’s loneliness. “Invitation to Hiding,” which features De Gennaro’s pump organ relaying its message over a chorus of nighttime insects and some alien jungle sounds made by tape manipulator Jameson Sweiger, is the sole performance to incorporate the sounds of other living things. Other tracks feel sufficiently at home with solitude to forgo accompaniment. The unhurried fiddle air, “New Dance,” and the title track, a brief piano study, need no company beyond the walls that bounces De Gennaro’s playing back his way. If he’s lost, he doesn’t sound particularly troubled about it.



Tracklist:
01 - Will and Wishes
02 - New Dance
03 - Thoughts in Exile
04 - I Shall Go Singing
05 - Invitation to Hiding
06 - Traveler's Moon
07 - In the Form of a Coffin Puller's Song
08 - Impromptu On a Hangover
09 - Sinecure March
10 - Laughing Lost in the Underground


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits