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*** Suzanne Langille & Loren Mazzacane Connors

1987-1989

(Secretly Canadian)

Recordings don't fly any farther under the radar than the early work of guitarist Loren Mazzacane. (He added the "Connors" at some point in the '90s.) Most of the songs collected here come from long out-of-print vinyl LPs (Bluesmaster 1 and 2, plus In Pittsburgh) that were originally packaged in plain white sleeves, identified only by a snapshot-size color photo labeled in gold marking pen.

If the albums seemed unsure they wanted to be seen at all, the music took the same attitude toward being heard. Mazzacane's specialty was and is quavering, poor-circulation blues taken so slowly that the term "tempo" loses application, and full of bent, nearly atonal single-note lines that never let you forget how a guitar string is just a hunk of wire vibrating rapidly. The present disc doesn't reissue the aforementioned albums whole, only the tracks on which Mazzacane accompanied (or, depending on how you listen, was accompanied by) the dusky voice and relatively earthbound acoustic picking of frequent collaborator Suzanne Langille. The source material is strictly trad (Chuck Berry's "Wee Wee Hours" is the most recent composition), but the duo make it their own: "Kumbaya" is decisively rescued from summer-camp sing-along status, and Mazzacane backs Lonnie Johnson's already chilling "Haunted House" by shaking noise out of his strings as if they were Jacob Marley's chains. Small in scale, huge in impact, this music is profoundly isolated but never solipsistic. As Langille writes in her half of the liner notes, "Pain is deep and devastating, but it's not just your own tragedy; it's the tragedy of those around you and those that came before you."

-- Franklin Bruno