Tower Open Fire by Marc Masters,
Wire Magazine
“Technically I was a late starter in music, not playing until I was a teenager,” says Pat Gubler, the New York based musician who performs and records under the name PG Six. “In school I met people who had been playing since they were five years old.” If the path that has led Gubler to his haunting strain of folk is unconventional — winding through his study of avant garde composition in college, the raw rock of his mid-90s trio Memphis Luxure, and the improvised sketches of his pioneering collective Tower Recordings — maybe that’s why PG Six’s songs fall equally within and outside of the folk tradition. “Traditional musicians are usually born into it,” he explains. “I know I stand a little bit outside of that world. But things are really wide open now. You can find someone growing up in Japan who gets into bluegrass and becomes a virtuoso banjo player.”
Gubler’s unique mix of classic shapes and experimental hues is exemplified on “Come In/The Winter It Is Past”, the second track on PG Six's latest album, The Well Of Memory. Opening with an aching banjo line and a cascading vocal duet with Helen Rush (one of his bandmates in Tower Recordings), the track melts into a whirring drone, then becomes a bright meditation on the seasons. The noise in the middle didn’t come from Gubler’s array of guitars, synths and harps, but rather from an impromptu harmonica orchestra he created during a performance at New York City’s Tonic in 2000. “I found a place that sold cheap harmonicas, and I ordered 50, and modified them so that some of the notes wouldn’t play,” he says. “I handed them out to the audience, and the sound they made was incredible.”
Gubler first adopted the PG Six moniker in the early days of Tower Recordings, swiping it from a character in Brion Gysin’s novel The Last Museum. “We had lots of nicknames for each other, and that’s just one that stuck,” Gubler says. “Tower was started as a kind of home recording sketchbook by Matt [Valentine], and whoever happened to walk through the door would join in.” Along with Gubler, Rush and Valentine, Tower has enlisted Spanish Wolfman, S Freyer Esq and Robert Henry Jones III to help stir their thick mix of Brit revival folk, murky Kraut-like jams and lo-fi aural experiments, a sound echoed today in groups like Animal Collective and Sunburned Hand Of The Man. Through the late 90s the group released five albums and a long-planned sixth is due later this year. During that period Gubler also recorded reams of solo material at home. The first PG Six release was the 1995 Book Of Rayguns 7”, a tingling slab of guitar textures. In 2001, he took some tapes to percussionist and producer Tim Barnes, who had recently joined Tower Recordings. Barnes helped Gubler edit the material into PG Six’s debut, Parlor Tricks And Porch Favorites, and added his own subtle drumming. “We just pieced it together in the studio, but tried to create the illusion of a live duo jamming,” recalls Gubler.
As mesmerising as Parlor Tricks is, The Well Of Memory is even stronger, a stunning seamless stream of shining tunes, dark hymns and layered drones. “Old Man On The Mountain” marries Gubler’s smoky storytelling to the traditional tune known as “The Cherry Tree Carol”. “I took the melody from the version on Shirley Collins and Davey Graham’s album Folk Roots, New Routes,” he confesses. “It’s such a weird song. It’s like a pseudo-Christmas song but it has a really creepy sound to it.” Gubler’s rock leanings surface in “Three Stages Of A Band”, a beautifully clunky instrumental that advances in staggered shifts. Its title, meanwhile, could be referring to the song’s distinct parts. “It’s really just kind of a joke to myself,” clarifies Gubler. “You look back on your experiences being in a group, and at first you’re really excited about it. After a while, you think, ‘This is crap’. Then down the line you reminisce about how much fun it was.”
The album’s deepest tracks are the two parts of “The Well Of Memory”. Both are bottomless vats of noise and echo, built primarily with the Bray and Wire String harps that Gubler mostly taught himself to play. He did start with a few lessons, though, from Robin Williamson of folk legends The Incredible String Band. “I’ve also learned a lot from watching him perform,” he adds. “I’ve probably seen him play something like 20 times. He has a very interesting way of stringing his material together. He’ll have stories that get interrupted by songs that in turn move on to something else.”
When Gubler himself performs, his songs emerge cautiously from his still frame, like messages from the past that have finally found a suitable conduit. At April’s Gladtree Festival in Amherst, Massachusetts, sitting frozen in near complete darkness, Gubler paralysed the crowd with his skin-raising tunes, pausing only to say, “I’m not exactly Mr Personality on stage.” But his meekness feels more reverent than awkward, as if his main goal were not to get in the way of his music. “I’m not the most natural person to be on a stage in front of people," he confirms. “At first it was a challenge to see if I could pull off solo shows. If I can get the sense that people get a little quieter, and lean forward during certain parts, I feel like I’m doing well.”
While Gubler plans to continue writing and recording as PG Six, his vault of home-taped material has become more manageable. “In Tower we tried to document a lot of stuff, and I used to do that personally too. But it gets so hard to catalogue all your tapes,” he chuckles. “And I’m more interested right now in learning how to craft songs. I could do something totally different tomorrow, but for today, that’s what I’m interested in.”
- June 2004