Dubious Pleasures, by Rob Clutton

Dubious Pleasures

by Rob Clutton

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Full Digital Discography

34

releases

Get all 34 Rat-drifting releases available on Bandcamp and save 40%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Cagey Doves, Asterballoo 22, Enamel • for Scott Thomson, solo trombone & Harmon mute, Hen's Teeth, How Things Happen, The Imaginary Brass Band, In The Same Room, Impossible Burger, and 26 more. , and , .

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1.	Taken Over By The Hounds Of Reason 03:33	buy track
2.	How Big Are The Dots 10:05	buy track
3.	Formal Garden 06:09	buy track
4.	Mr. Taciturn 01:52	buy track
5.	Half Smile 03:48	buy track
6.	Air 02:09	buy track
7.	Cloak 02:40	buy track
8.	Musicians And Animals 04:10	buy track
9.	Pond 13:06	buy track

about

Rob Clutton is certainly one of the most prodigious, prolific, and radically creative bassists working out of Toronto. He is or has been a member of, This Moment, NOJO, the Steve Koven Trio, Jazzstory, Handslang, John Millard and Happy Day, the Ryan Driver Quartet and numerous other ongoing projects involving musicians such as David Mott, Nick Fraser, Doug Tielli, Brodie West, and Eric Chenaux. Rob also has two CD’s released featuring his own band and compositions: Tender Buttons and Holstein Dream Pageant. These recordings showed Rob to have an utterly particular compositional imagination as weird layerings of extended improvisations slide in and around the liquid architecture of his prescribed, modular materials. As Stuart Broomer said in the notes for Holstein Dream Pageant: "It's not music that lends itself to easy definition; instead, it's music that defines itself along with the act of listening, assuming shapes in subtle accord with a listener's own potential". The same could be said of his new release on Rat-drifting, Dubious Pleasures. It's a solo string bass album and it's also a collection of nine very distinct compositions. But if Rob's writing for ensemble embraces formal machinations—peculiar successions, montagings and collagings—these solo works circumscribe nine very focused proposals of what a piece can be. Each can almost sound like a vernacular music; nine artefacts from nine impossible cultures handed down through uncanny oral traditions. Even at their most sonically extrapolated they never sound like mere modernist explorations (although a sense of more alchemical experimentation is evident throughout). Rob is a fiddler and a drummer. For all its clarity this music never gives up its mystery.

credits

released July 16, 2021

Rob Clutton — Solo Double Bass, Compositions and Improvisations.
Produced and Recorded by Eugene Martynec
Recorded at Automata Sonique in Toronto, 2004
Additional Mastering by John Oswald at M Lab

Design by Lewis Nicholson
Photography by Rob Clutton

Thank you Eric Chenaux, Elisabeth Harvor, Martin Arnold, David Mott, and Ken Vandermark.

All tunes © & ℗ 2005 Rob Clutton SOCAN

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Rat-drifting Toronto, Ontario

Rat-drifting music searches for specificity, celebrates detail. It experiments with radical particularity and wonders about the possibilities and potentials of those experiments. If the music drifts, it does so in the hopes that the listener drifts with it—her/his imagination experimenting with the possibilities of the music as well, as they find their own route through their own experience. ... more

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