Nick Dunston

Spider Season is a new trio, assembled by illustrious bassist, composer, and question-asker Nick Dunston, featuring Kalia Vandever on trombone and effects, and DoYeon Kim on gayageum. Likely the only improvising bass, trombone, and gayageum trio you will hear any time soon, as if that matters -novelty passes quickly. This record endures, but first it makes you grab a pencil to draw a Venn diagram (that looks faintly like a fleur des lis) to better understand its elements. Some aspects herein:

Bass and trombone share register.
Bass and gayageum share a bow (on occasion)
Everyone is moving their arms.
Plucked bass and gayageum share quick decay.
Bowed Bass and trombone share the image of someone singing low and strong as they Zamboni the ice rink.
Trombone and gayageum share a cloud of air around each of their notes, rasp.
Everyone is listening.

Most of the time, everyone is playing (or in a notable moment, singing). Nick told me that he made this band to create a situation where they could “create different types of songs and soundscapey structures.” Calling symphonies “songs” is a sweet joke a friend of mine from music school used to make. I am floating the ghost of that joke here to underscore the versatility of this trio. For such sweet people, as a trio they can be very, very big, big like how spiders seem to true arachnophobes. I was told the pieces were loose, open sketches. Listening to them, these pieces feel like (the memories of) global symphonies.

In some cases, the bigness of the sound is in implication. Songs like Rewind Fee and Vicious Daily Fashion plant the imagination of a drum in my mind, so strong is the groove. In other cases, the bigness of the trio is their kinship - dig DoYeon’s gayageum solo, so sensitive, deep into Thousand-Year-Old Vampire, a small time-lapsed growing root observed by Kalia’s loving entrance. Ultimately, the trio is big because it is patient. By patient, I mean expansive, as if in these structures, the time of this music could go on forever. Nick plays (and composes) patiently. His impeccable breathing bass on Pollinator, echoing like waves or like a rower on the waves. The pleading pulse of Dystopian Christmas. Genrelessness music. Width.

Another diagram:
Apocryphally, three improvisers are and are not listening to each other. This is community. Actually, three improvisers are living in a world they have superimposed. This is continuity.
Abstractly, three improvisers play court music for a dusty unlost anti-Atlantis, sounding as a moving cloud that is also thousands of soft ants. This is care.

(Liner Notes by Wendy Eisenberg, April 2022)