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Ed Osborn: Stone North
Estuary Ltd.

Estuary Ltd. follows up its recent {Impact + Aftermath} release by Mem1 member Mark Cetilia with another bold collection, this one the first first full-length album from Ed Osborn since 1989. Presented in a distinctive letterpress-printed sleeve and issued in a numbered edition of 300, the forty-three-minute release {Stone North} presents three live recordings, each piece different in character, instrumentation, and length, with the shortest five minutes and the longest twenty-six. They are, to be sure, challenging experimental works and not always easy listening either. They're also fascinating explorations of the range of sounds that conventional and unconventional instruments are capable of producing.

Fittingly titled after Shaker community members Elisha D'Alembert Blakeman and Tabitha Babbitt, who respectively invented a single-stringed tabletop instrument called the “piano violin” (patented in 1871) and the circular saw in 1810, “In Memoriam Elisha Blakeman & Tabitha Babbitt” (1989-92) was realized live in the studio by Osborn and Brenda Hutchinson. In keeping with Blakeman's creation, the two used skis to bow across a pair of electric skis laid flat, resulting in five minutes of monstrous scrapes whose reverberant residue dissipates into the extended pauses following each pass. As daunting as such a description might sound, the piece itself is generally easy on the ears, especially when it's performed in such a way that it grows progressively quieter and more peaceful as it unfolds.

Osborn realized 1992's “Guitar Mechanical” by laying the guitar flat and playing it from above with pickups in each hand, pickups in this case encased in cylindrical metal containers so that they also could serve as slides. The result is eleven minutes of prickly, spider-like thrum and shudder whose waves sometimes crash aggressively ashore, in a manner of speaking. Dispersed across the stereo field into separable halves, the sound masses charge, their attack sometimes delivered in a hocketing formation and their speed of attack modulating between slow and fast.

January 2014