Update: Guitarist/songwriter/composer/vocalist Janet Feder was scheduled to perform at Live at Thrive in Corrales on August 4, but pesky circumstances beyond everyone’s control prevented that from happening. This weekend, she is making good on her pledge to return and will be appearing both at Live at Thrive in Corrales and at Littleglobe in Santa Fe. Check the updated concert information at the end of this post for details. The Corrales concert is a benefit for Littleglobe 501(C)(3) in Santa Fe. Littleglobe is committed to interdisciplinary, collaborative art projects that foster life-affirming connections across the boundaries that divide us.

Sui generis guitarist/songwriter/composer/vocalist Janet Feder has been on a long journey of discovery over the course of her career, and in her masterwork, T H I S C L O S E, released in 2015, the fruits of that journey have coalesced, as much the result of intense hard work as of serendipity. She’ll be performing in Corrales in an intimate setting on December 7 and in Santa Fe on December 8 at Littleglobe, and her unfortunately rare appearances here should not be missed.

A musical sponge
The Boulder, Colorado, native got started early—at age five on ukulele, which she taught herself to play before moving to the guitar. Her father taught her the folk music that he had learned in the navy, and her mother, a pianist, exposed her to the classical repertoire. She dove into the rock ’n’ roll of the ’60s and ’70s and mastered a finger-picking style of play, but it was the music of J. S. Bach that consumed her for a number of years. She attended the high school of the Royal Music Conservatory of Brussels and earned a bachelor’s degree in musicology from the University of Massachusetts.

Ultimately, she came to the conclusion that her skills as a classical guitarist were insufficient to support a career. Her curiosity, however, had opened her ears to a wide array of music from progressive rock to Brazilian jazz to Argentinian folktronica. All of the influences that she absorbed over the years find their way into her original music, making it all but impossible to categorize.

Serendipity strikes
In the mid-nineties, quite by accident, Feder stumbled on a technique that has become her signature: prepared guitar. She discovered that by putting various objects—broken rings, roach clips, metal rulers, beads, horsehair, etc.—onto the strings of her guitar, she could extend the instrument’s sonic range, creating unique, expressive, delightfully disorienting sounds.

The objects can create a buzz, hum, thump, or bell-like tone, or refract a tone into multiple colors—it’s a near endless list of possibilities. She typically prepares only one or two strings, and the objects she chooses to use and their positioning are the result of years of experimentation.

This ongoing process of experimentation has led Feder into a unique universe of sound, and it has made her a singular sonic poet, always in search of le son juste, whether by preparing the guitar or some other instrument, or employing an everyday object. Feder does not use pedals or other digital effects; she creates the sounds using only her hands, her instruments, and the objects. The preparation reshapes the music, extending the range of sound and feeling.

Serendipity also delivered to Feder the instrument she had been hearing in her head for years but had not found. When a friend played a song for her on a classical baritone guitar built by Milan Sabljic, she broke into tears. She had Sabljic build her a custom baritone, and that has been her primary guitar for years. (She doesn’t take it with her anymore on airplanes, but she will be driving down from her home in Denver with it for the Corrales concert.)

T H I S C L O S E
As revealing as it is mysterious, as shadowed as lit, as pissed off as forgiving, the music on T H I S C L O S E feels so intimate that you listen with bated breath, and you want to go back and listen again. Because you can’t believe how it can be so spare and so lush at the same time. Because of the mysterious sounds that captured you. Because it seems to have sprung whole and complete from some deep well.

“Well, then, I guess I succeeded in making the album that I wanted to hear,” says Feder on the phone from Denver. “This is an album that I really allowed myself to make work that was in that place between my head and my heart. The other work that I had done had been more in my head.”

Wherever it came from, it was nowhere close to the surface, and much is going on below the surface. The album’s deep soundstage demand that you immerse yourself, which seems only fitting, given that it was recorded at Immersive Studios in Boulder.

Feder has nothing but praise for the collaborative efforts of Immersive’s producer Joe Shepard and engineer Mike Yach, with whom she had worked on her previous album, Songs with Words. “We found something utterly magical working together, the three of us,” she says.

Feder’s baritone gets pride of place on the album, but she also plays an electric guitar, piano, prepared banjo, prepared hammered dulcimer, vocals, and “sounds.” Three tracks on the album have lyrics, with potent poetic imagery, such as this from the opener, “Crows”:

What a day
crows pitch and wheel in the wind
calling out over and over again
don’t go there

Inside silently
spinning a cocoon
don’t let summer fail
don’t murder the moon

Stop drop and roll
can’t come close to cure
what the hell happened here

Feder sings with a warm, intimate voice free of artifice that draws you deeper into the music. Her melodic lines, with or without lyrics, are inescapable, tugging you into the feeling.

She emplys a cohort of A-list Denver musicians to support her on percussion, double bass, bass harmonica, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, and bass. Most tracks are set against a subtle, shifting background of often unidentifiable sounds, and the sonic layers, precisely calibrated, mesmerise. Part of the album’s mystery and emotional impact comes from those sounds, which Shepard, Yach, and Feder searched for with the single-mindedness of kids at play.

The title track is an extended meditation that features a progression of strummed chords on the baritone against a swirling, shifting, barely discernible, unidentifiable background. All of it is offset by the strumming of a prepared Dutch doorbell that sounds like Morse code. Halfway through the track, the guitar and doorbell disappear, and the listener is left with a mysterious sonic current that carries you to the end of the album’s narrative. (It’s worth noting that the album does present a narrative. “I didn’t write singles,” says Feder.) That sound is, in part, two dinner plates set on hollow pedestals, each with a ball bearing being rolled around in it.

The wind that Feder wanted to add at the end of “She Sleeps with the Sky” comes from Shepard playing the studio door, opening it a crack, moving it slightly back and forth, and recording the incoming rush of air. (The crickets were an unexpected and welcome bonus.)

At some point, Feder had gifted Shepard and Yach with a Slinky. They stretched it out across the studio on mike stands and experimented with rubbing various things against the length of the spring. They got an interesting sound when they used a cymbal, and they recorded it. “When I heard that sound, I was like, ‘I want that everywhere,’ but of course, it only goes where it goes,” says Feder. Yach gets the album credit for “cymbaled spring.”

Odd as they may sound, these odd sound sources are remarkably musical. They are essential threads in the musical fabric that Feder and her playmates have woven, and they add an indefinable dimension.

Corrales calling
Corraleño Roch Doran has access to a space at Thrive Chiropractic that is perfect for intimate concerts, and he’s wanting to set up an ongoing series of first-Sunday events, Live at Thrive. When Mark Weber—Albuquerque’s preeminent eminence grise in the musical world—heard about this, he suggested Doran check out Feder.

Doran was familiar with the album Feder had made with Fred Frith, Ironic Universe, went to her Bandcamp page to see what she’d been up to since then, and bought some of her music. Feder, who likes to thank folks who purchase her music, emailed Doran, and when presented with an opportunity to come play in New Mexico, she accepted Doran’s invitation.

Weber also suggested that Feder check out Musically Speaking. She reached out to me and sent me T H I S C L O S E, which is how she and I ended up on the phone for 90 minutes. She’s a generous artist who makes unique and compelling music.

Janet Feder
with special guest Chris Jonas
Saturday, December 7, 7:00 p.m.
At Live at Thrive
4685 Corrales Road in Corrales
Tickets: $15
For info: 310-823-3655 or liveatthrive@gmail.com

Janet Feder
with Chris Jonas, Paul Brown, and Dave Wayne
Sunday, December 8, 7:00 p.m.
At Littleglobe
2350 Fox Road, Suite 200, in Santa Fe
Tickets: S10–$20 sliding
For info: 505-670-4364 or chris@littleglobe.org

© 2019 Mel Minter