The blues is full of the mystical and the hidden. Bluesmen hid magical objects like rattlesnake rattlers in their guitars, which would augment the supernatural sounds of their strings with the sympathetic resonance of the snake. The devil appeared as a snake to Eve, and to Robert Johnson. In Fire Lapping at the Creek we hear these resonances from a distant time and place, from this deepest wellspring of American music making.

Earth’s Precisions crafts a musical surface that simulates both a larger ensemble and a single, hybrid instrument. At times, the composite of guitar and saxophone is pushed to extremes, as each of the five co-composed pieces explore the impossible polyphony of an expansive terrain, speaking in tongues. The duo shares an expressive vocality and an approach to construction that is both elemental and ritualistic, while at other times haunting and ethereal, permeated by a dose of horror. Inspired by the lineage of guitar/saxophone duos — from Fred Frith and Anthony Braxton to Tim Berne and Bill Frisell — Earth’s Precisions expands on this tradition, at once confounding the sounds of their instruments past recognition and returning them to a seemingly nascent state.