Exposé print issues (1993-2011)
Kevin Kastning / Mark Wingfield — The WNYC Sessions
(Greydisc GDR3593, 2025, CD / DL)
by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-07-01
As you might surmise from the title, The WNYC Sessions is a radio broadcast, recorded August 18, 2018, and like nearly all of the recordings by Kastning and his collaborators, the pieces here seem to be composed in the moment, here featuring Mark Wingfield playing electric guitar and Kevin Kastning playing a custom 17-string hybrid classical guitar (acoustic), and sometimes (as on the nine-minute “Gilder-77,” “1071-S,” or “Gansevoort-99”) piano. The seven pieces wander through mysterious caverns with a powerful dreamlike quality, seemingly in a sea of reverb, constantly changing and switching back, with never a repeated idea. The two protagonists already have about a dozen recordings together, so they are well versed in the way their spirits travel and can most easily navigate through each others’ ideas as they create these sonic tapestries together. Regardless of the piece, it’s Wingfield who seems to drive the melodies, his strong effected leads flowing in and out of Kastning’s textural backdrops, whether it be 17 strings or piano, he approaches both instruments in a similar way, although he generally handles the bass component, as evidenced on the opener “Oculus-50.” A listener might find themselves drifting through space on many of these pieces, as there is really no cadence per se, they speed up and slow down at will, sometimes at the same time, the two players bouncing off one another as they proceed through a colorful forest of random ideas put to sound. One never knows what’s coming around the next corner, because there really are no corners to speak of, only a constant flow of ideas in a subtly beautiful trajectory. One can’t even begin to describe the shapes, forms and colorations of this constant motion of sonic alchemy, because everything is fleeting; by the time anyone notices it, it’s already gone and onto another idea, leaving only a memory and a feeling that existed for a fragment of time. The WNYC Sessions presents two musical geniuses exploring unknown worlds together.
Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases
Related artist(s): Kevin Kastning, Mark Wingfield
More info
http://kevinkastning.bandcamp.com/album/the-wnyc-sessions
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