other reasons by rootless

Jeremy Hurewitz’s rootless project stretches across several albums of guitar-centric music, some of which feature solo guitar, others of which are adorned with synthesizer sounds and other instruments. Throughout all of those albums, though, the thing that often sets Hurewitz apart from his peers is the way that his music refuses to settle into the background. For instance, Hurewitz’s great solo guitar albums, including 2017’s “Sculptures Deep Within The Cave” and 2022’s “What the Truth Leaves Out” are as challenging as they are pleasing, particularly in those moments when Hurewitz’s patient guitar sounds start to warp, or unstick themselves from tempo, or stagger into a tangles of dissonance. The same is true of his albums where guitar is a piece of a larger sound environment, like “Docile Cobras” and “Emptied Spaces,” both from 2020. One moment, they are centered, colorful, even spiritual, and the next, they are places spiritual reckoning — shifting, uneasy landscapes painted with a stark, vivid realism. In all of those cases, the uniting element is a very personal kind of grasping for truth, and an accompanying willingness to go to spaces of both light and dark.

Other Reasons has those same qualities, but it is also Hurewitz’s most ambitious work, not only musically — although it is the first rootless album to feature Hurewitz’s vocals in a prominent way— but also structurally, particularly in its fluidity. The album begins with the title track, an immersion into a stream that, here, is composed of synthesizers, guitar, pattering cymbals, and distant vocalizations. As that stream flows through the rest of the album, it metamorphosizes. “Feet of Clay” is more sharply emotional, thanks in large part to the melancholy of Zachary Paul’s violin and Ash Brooks’ guest vocals. “Half Truth,” at the center of the album, begins formlessly, with a quality of refracted light — this first part is comprised of loops of guitars and vocals by guest Matt Lajoie as well as more violin by Paul — until, suddenly, the second half of the song slithers out from below, a disorienting chant of paranoia and alienation, Hurewitz’s voice obscured, like the voice in the back of your mind, accompanied by a sinister groove that is underpinned by the bass, played by another guest, Don Chase. Then, the album flows forward, again, into “Who Am I?,” a relatively sparse track on which Hurewitz, his vocal at its clearest, takes stock of himself in the cold light of day. The track climaxes with Tripp Dudley’s tabla and Paul’s violin. The end of “Who Am I?” propels the albumtoward the finale, “What Once Was Will Be Again,” a guitar-centered contemplation that is closest toHurewitz’s earlier work.

Where earlier rootless albums sometimes felt like direct channels to Hurewitz’s subconscious, Other Reasons feels like a model of the subconscious, particularly in the stream-like passages between contemplation and dream, groove and drone, the subliminal and the diaristic. It’s a fitting concept for an artist whose approach has always felt particularly personal — an invitation to listeners to submerge themselves in that river where thought and sensory experience intertwine; an honest endeavor to grasp toward, and to share, something personal and true.

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