RYAN DRIVER - Feeler Of Pure Joy

The label "difficult" is often used to highlight musical works whose enjoyment isn't immediate or straightforward. "Feeler Of Pure Joy" is an album I could call difficult, but not because it's hard to love — rather, unlike much of today's output, it's an album that can come across as either irritating or overwhelming. The key to unlocking it is total psychological surrender.

Ryan Driver's solo debut is a strange mix of predictable folk songs and disorienting psychedelic excursions: the singing amiably drifts off the melody, and the 60s-sci-fi textures add a disenchantment that stirs up emotional conflict in the listener.

Ryan Driver has played in numerous outfits such as Deep Dark United, The Reveries, The Silt, St. Dirt Elementary School, The Guayaveras, The Draperies, Blah Blah 666, N, Cluttertones, Organballoon The Fake and New Age Music Band, has collaborated with Sandro Perri in Double Suicide, and leads a jazz group with the none-too-subtle name The Ryan Driver Quartet.

Among the countless mutations of the Canadian musician, the most recent one, with Silt, seems closest to his eccentricities; the recent European release of their second album "Cat's Peak" drew renewed attention even though the album had already been out since 2006 in Canada and the United States — perhaps because it represents the summa of the musician's intuitions. But "Feeler Of Pure Joy" stakes its claim as the most intense work in his sprawling discography.

Ryan Driver's unhinged passion for impossible instruments like the nose flute, balloons, a wood saw and cellphone speakers, together with his bent for jazz and sonic deconstruction, can't help but recall Tom Waits, but his creativity has also materialized in the invention of the near-ruler bass (a strip of metal held down with one hand on a table and plucked and strummed with the other), whose atonal tones lend his music a uniquely dreamlike charm.

Other unhinged quirks of Ryan Driver include his passion for cats (on his myspace you can only post if you use cat pictures), already made explicit in the title of the Silt album ("Cat's Peak", precisely), and his original research into the sounds that can be coaxed out of deflated balloons used as if they were blades of grass.

Now it gets tricky to talk about the music on "Feeler Of Pure Joy": wild intuitions and sonic oddities are everywhere, creating a disorienting effect.

An analytical listen to the album isn't advisable; the songs are built to disorient and draw you in at the same time. The grace of the opening duet with Jennifer Castle ("You Are Beside Me") and the Will Oldham-style country ballad "It's Nothing" soften the psychedelic trance of the sublime "When Were You in Mexico?", where the ghost of Tim Buckley wanders through the song's sonic weave without ever overpowering it.

Strange rhythmic alchemies distract from the acoustic textures of "That's Which Way The Waterfalls"; delirium pervades the vocals on "Time And Trouble", which embraces atonal moods devoid of apparent poetry, while the most indigestible jazz upends the immense lyrical content of "Oh The World Between Us", one of the most unsettling displays of songwriting, its sickly melancholy recalling Roy Harper's "Acapulco Gold".

Nocturnal and very dense, "No One Can Say Too Well" and "Why the Road?" are two folk-jazz pieces that seem to have stepped straight out of the pages of John Martyn's "Inside Out".

There's room for a vibrant jolt of rock with "Spinning Towers", the only track where the electric guitars raise their voice with real force and grit, before the fairy-tale romanticism of "Feeler Of Pure Joy" comforts the listener — but it's an illusion lasting only a few seconds, as the magical, dreamlike atmospheres are disturbed by Robert Wyatt-style organs, electronic treatments with no sense of linearity, and demonic, floating vocalizing.

Ryan Driver is a complex, creative artist, perhaps destined to remain a cult figure in this confused decade of the new millennium, but those who manage to break through the defenses of his sound will discover a fascinating and stimulating artist. His musical language is still not fully defined, but when it is, he'll be impossible to ignore.

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22/12/2009