Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays

As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls is the only album credited jointly to the guitarist Pat Metheny and the keyboardist Lyle Mays. The two were the main writers of the Pat Metheny Group. Made with the Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, it trades the group's bright song forms for a twenty-minute sound piece and four shorter, more intimate tracks. Released by ECM in April 1981, it gives synthesizers and studio texture a larger role than any of Metheny's earlier records.

The album was recorded at Talent Studio in Oslo in the autumn of 1980, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Metheny plays six- and twelve-string acoustic guitars, electric guitar and bass. Mays plays piano, synthesizer, organ and autoharp, and Vasconcelos adds berimbau, percussion, drums and voice. All five pieces are credited to Metheny and Mays, and the sleeve thanks Steve Swallow, who suggested the title.

The title track fills the old first side. It opens with murmuring crowd noise, a muted roar and a steady bass pulse under strummed guitar. It then moves through a slow electronic trance before a guitar theme returns over drums and layered synthesizers. Children's voices drift through the fading coda. On the other side, September Fifteenth is a quiet duet for guitar and piano dedicated to Bill Evans, who died on that date in 1980. It's For You sets twelve-string guitar against synthesizer figures and a wordless vocal from Vasconcelos, while Estupenda Graça ends the album briefly and gently.

Reviewing the album in The New York Times in July 1981, Stephen Holden called the title track "a moodily atmospheric work with the pictorial quality of a sound track". He also wrote that it was Mays "who dominates the record", and singled out the Evans elegy as a tour de force for him. Forty years on, Jason M. Rubin of The Arts Fuse described it as a sprawling masterpiece unlike anything Metheny had made before.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1190, first released in 1981 and reissued by ECM in 2022 in a trifold digisleeve inside a card outer case.