Pitchfork Forkcast: New Music: Alexander Tucker: "Veins to the Sky" [MP3/Stream]

New Music: Alexander Tucker: "Veins to the Sky" [MP3/Stream]

Alexander Tucker submerges the fingerpicking idioms of folk in raga-esque drones, layering cello and electronic mandolin atop his accomplished acoustic guitar playing and multi-tracked tenor. In the UK this has already won this sometime Jackie-O Motherfucker collaborator and former member of 1990s hardcore band Unhome much ecstatic praise, as well as gigs opening for Deerhoof, Explosions in the Sky, and, most recently, labelmates Fuck Buttons. "It's always waiting in the wake of it," comes Tucker's high, clear vocal on "Veins to the Sky", the first mp3 from his forthcoming third ATP album Portal. The song is an example of Tucker's songwriting at its more direct, but it's the symphonic textures and miasmic chord changes that will probably grab your attention before lyrics or melody. Like Fuck Buttons' sound or the kind of car you were gonna have to buy before everybody started talking up a gas tax holiday a couple of weeks ago and solved all our oil problems, it's a hybrid, but rather than between pastoral techno and visceral noise-- or gas and electric-- it's between ancient sounds and the psychedelic capacities of one man and some looping gear.