Matt Lajoie has been a wellspring of cosmically attuned guitar explorations under a multitude of monikers since co-founding the uncannily prolific Flower Room label with Ash Brooks in 2017. With a personal and collaborative catalog hovering near triple digits, and having already logged two releases this fall with the always-excellent Garden Portal and Jewel Garden labels, it’s hard to say that Lajoie ever really ‘returns’ with a new album so much as he seems to manifest them.
The sprawling automatic compositions of Red Resonant Earth spring like mycorrhizae from the groundwork laid by kosimiche forerunners like Gottsching, Fricke, and Rother, reaching simultaneously toward realms both celestial and terrestrial. Immaculately looped passages of electric twelve-string wind like nimble tendrils through the opening textures of ‘Born Free’ and ‘Sprout’ before burrowing into the darker hues of ‘Mammoth’ and ‘Taos Hum > Claymaking,’ which spin out like Terry Riley and Roger McGuinn locked in perpetual dervish. When paired with Land Mass, a digital/tape counterpart via Flower Room, Red Resonant Earth exemplifies the grand expanse of Lajoie’s sonic vision. It’s music that delves deep into the reaches of the underland while Lajoie holds the lamp, pressing ever onward through subterranean caverns, his picking glimmering like caches of amethyst, until we emerge once again to see the light of the world anew. | j annis
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