If the title doesn’t tip you off, the Jung Hee Choi cover art will: this is an homage to La Monte Young. Catler is a veteran of Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band and Choi’s own Sundara All Star Band, with a long history of playing microtonal electric guitar across a range of genres. As an homage, The Young Mountain of the East is a well-informed and constructive extension of Young’s legacy, more than any derivative or sound-alike “tribute”. Catler takes the opening chord of Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano and builds upon it, extending the paired intervals beyond Young’s imposed limit om harmonic complexity into even finer gradations (to get technical and quantitative, Young’s composition sticks with pitches relatable to the first seven harmonic overtones – Catler’s goes as far as thirteen). Written as a double quartet for overdubbed fretless guitars, Catler produces rich but translucent sonorities made of e-bowed strings in esoteric tuning. The generated harmonies of the chords are very tasty, with the signature sound being the use of sliding tones to resolve from one set of intervals to another. The piece is organised into twelve sections, each of precisely equal length, suggesting the formal rigor beneath the music’s superstructure. While there is a logic to the piece as it progresses from one set of intervals to the next, it also allows development and further apparent flexibility to emerge as a consequence of the process – from one section to the next things get more complex, until reversing and resolving back to the initial stability of the opening section. Catler uses the complexity to extrapolate rhythms out of the beating frequencies in the centre of the piece, breaking the prevailing gloss of the sustainer guitars, and even cuts loose a little with some melismatic soloing before stability reasserts itself. It’s a different beast from Young’s own works, as you would hope, while sharing some of the same qualities: interrogative study, self-discipline, a devotional approach to expression, an immaculate surface. It does not, however, make demands on the listener’s endurance.
Reprinted with thanks to Boring Like a Drill