There are few instruments that suit a hot day better than the pedal steel guitar. Based on the laptop guitars of tropical Hawaii, and forged in the blazing sun of the deep south, its distinctive sound is drowsy, languid, frictionless and deliciously hazy. On a standard guitar, you can only really slide notes upwards by bending the strings, but on a pedal steel – using multiple foot and knee pedals – you can also pitch-bend down with ease, which gives the impression of a melody slowly melting, sighing, receding into the distance.
This nine-track LP – subtitled A Survey of Modern Pedal Steel – was compiled by Luke Schneider, a Nashville-based steel player who, like most others on the album, makes his living playing with Americana and alt-country bands. But this collection moves us outside the country vernacular. Schneider submits a piece of spartan minimalism based around a repeated seven-note descending phrase; Barry Walker Jr creates a Steve Reich-ish piece comprising multiple interlocking, harmonised riffs; New Yorker Jonny Lam provides a harmonic-heavy, reverb-drenched solo rooted in traditional Hawaiian tropes.
Rocco DeLuca makes the pedal steel sound like a sitar, accompanied by an equally woozy string section, while Danish virtuoso Maggie Björklund mixes Ry Cooder-style desert blues, Hindustani flourishes and death metal. Best known here is probably BJ Cole, a fixture on the session scene since the early 1970s, who submits a wonderfully plangent six-minute drone-based piece called Ely Revisited; his fellow Londoner, Nashville resident Spencer Cullum, also namechecks Blighty with a woozy jazz waltz called An Ode to Dungeness.
This isn’t a particularly avant garde collection (try the 2020 compilation Secular Steel if you’re after the freakier stuff) but Baltimore-based composer Susan Alcorn brilliantly exploits the non-fretted properties of the instrument – the notes between the notes – and her contribution, Gilmor Blue, recalls the microtonal works of Harry Partch or Iannis Xenakis. A real treat.
Also out this month
Luke Schneider, along with fellow pedal steel renegade Chuck Johnson, also guests on Fleeting Adventure (Basin Rock), a new album by the Australian banjo player Andrew Tuttle. Featuring folksy banjo and guitar arpeggios set against ambient synth soundscapes, it occupies a similar world to Imaginational Anthem. Ima by Tegh & Adel Poursamadi (Injazero Records) is a Tehran-based collaboration between an electronica producer and a violinist. Glitchy industrial drones, scratchy electronic flourishes and air-raid-siren wails are set against elegant violin and touches of stately Persian chamber music. Irene Sorozábal is an Amsterdam-based Spanish recorder virtuoso: her first, self-titled album with her band Kurkuma (TRPTK) sees her playing recorder and singing her own angular art songs in a pure mezzo-soprano. Her sparse, ECM-ish chamber jazz ensemble are located somewhere between Meredith Monk, Norma Winstone and Schubert.