Room40 returns with one of their most exciting releases of the year, "Evening Air", the long awaited second full-length from the all-star duo of Loren Connors and David Grubbs. Picking up seamlessly from where its predecessor, 2003's “Arborvitae", left off, this lovingly produced, limited edition LP encounters these two experimental journeymen weaving stunning sonorities and textures - awash with ambience and space - alternating between piano and guitar, culminating as one of the most beautifully restrained gestures of subtle interplay we can call to mind.

Over the last 20 years, Lawrence English’s Room40 imprint has become an unmistakable force in the landscape of experimental, electronic, and electroacoustic music, enveloping a vast global network that extends far beyond its Australian roots. Its sprawling catalog of releases, currently numbering into the hundreds, traverses an incredibly diverse range of highly individual practices, spanning numerous generations, guided by an eye for innovation and artists that venture off the beaten path. Room40’s latest, “Evening Air”, is a particularly noteworthy event, marking the return of the duo of Loren Connors and David Grubbs, after more than two decades of absence in recorded form.

First emerging during the late 1970s, weaving an entirely singular form of avant-garde Blues, Loren Connors stands high among the most important guitarists of the 20th century; a visionary whose singular approach to the instrument has entirely reconfigured how its potential is perceived. Most well known for his remarkable, experimental improvisations, made under his own name as well as the aliases Guitar Roberts, Loren Mazzacane, and Loren Mattei, Connors has always cut a wider creative path, often rethinking more traditional approaches to music making and song. Following a break from music during the 1980s which saw him focus his energies on the art of haiku, during the 90s Connors entered a period of heightened activity over the coming decade or so, creating groundbreaking works for Ecstatic Peace! offshoot, Father Yod; hatNOIR; Secretly Canadian; Drag City; Table Of The Elements; and numerous others which garnered him a new generation of collaborators and fans, including notable luminaries of that period like Alan Licht, Keiji Haino, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, and David Grubbs.

Despite their difference in age and distinct generational points of origin, both Connors and Grubbs’ activities have followed a similar path: where Connors exploded and entirely rethought the Blues on avant-garde terms, Grubbs did the same for punk. First emerging within the vibrant Louisville, Kentucky, scene of the 1980s working within projects like Squirrel Bait and Bastro, Grubbs reached wide acclaim, following his move to Chicago, within Gastr del Sol, his groundbreaking creative partnership with Jim O'Rourke, which entirely upended the perceived boundaries between multiple musical idioms of radically experimental terms and brought each of its artists into close contact with equally forward thinking artists from previous generations like John Fahey and Tony Conrad, as well as Connors himself.

Grubbs and Connors’ debut collaboration as a duo, “Arborvitae” - issued by the Swedish imprint Häpna in 2003 - is a particularly standout effort in both artists’ respective discographies, sculpting glacially minimal expanses on piano and guitar. When entering the studio together for the first time in over 20 years to record that album’s long awaited follow-up, “Evening Air”, the pair logically came to rest within the same instrumental palette, each trading off: Grubbs behind the keyboard and Connors on guitar for the two gently expansive pieces on the first side, with the opposite configuration for three pieces on the second, including a stunning version of Connors’s and Suzanne Langille’s “Child”.

“Evening Air” feels very much like a sequel to “Arborvitae”. Both share similar dynamic sensibilities and choices of instrumental interplay across their respective lengths, each piece slightly forwarding the piano and using the guitar as a more subtle counterpoint of texture and tone, culminating as slow, minimal works of immersive and emotive depth. The marked difference between the two is perhaps a greater sense of atmosphere and ambience that emerges within “Evening Air”, produced by blankets of reverberance that coat each artist’s interventions like a gauzy mist.

Delicate, profoundly subtle and stunningly beautiful - drawing the ear toward microscopic detail within a blurred haze - Grubbs and Connors’ five piano works move even further toward unveiling the unique intimacy and sense of possibility that these two artists share: each note and response feeling as carefully placed and considered as they do intuitive and effortless. But, in true fashion, they throw a wildcard in the mix with “It’s Snowing Onstage”, encountering the pair in a much dryer mix, locked in dialog on bristling electric guitars, before Connors unexpectedly switches to drums and delivers a startling sense of polyrhythm and texture into the mix.

Unquestionably long overdue, Grubbs and Connors’ “Evening Air” joins a growing body of work on Connors that increasingly keeps us on the edge of our seats. An especially potent counterpart to OTOROKU’s recently released piano / guitar duo with Alan Licht, “The Blue Hour”, it can’t help but make you wonder why we haven’t heard more of the veteran guitarist on piano, and why it’s taken him so many years to return to the studio with Grubbs.