Musicwhore.org Music and memory

One of the most influential issues published by Pulse magazine was a supplement covering the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Those 20-some odd pages was my encyclopedia of the downtown New York scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Of course, I had no means to listen to any of the music described in that guide. Tower Records had a wide-reaching stock, but downtown New York albums just didn’t reach Honolulu unless it was released on a major label, i.e. Nonesuch.

Soldier String Quartet was one of those ensembles mentioned in Pulse, and my burgeoning interest in Kronos Quartet made me curious about Soldier as well. I wouldn’t spot any of their albums in the wild till I lived in New York City from 1992 to 1993. I had to leave them on the shelf because I was living on a student income (read: parents’ money).

I had honestly forgotten about Soldier String Quartet till I was flipping through the stacks of Crossroads Music in Portland, Ore. I spotted Sequence Girls selling for $6, and I had to sate my curiosity once and for all.

Kronos traces its lineage back to Josef Haydn, but Soldier can only draw a tenuous link to that tradition. With bass and drums augmenting the quartet, Sequence Girls is clearly a rock album. The quartet plays with a lot of fire, and David Soldier’s original works can get crunchy.

The album also includes arrangements of delta blues songs from Muddy Waters, Skip James and Charley Patton that don’t attempt to clean up the source material.

In addition to performing Soldier originals, the quartet premiered works by the likes of Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins and Fred Frith. Wikipedia mentions Soldier String Quartet served as a training ground for other ensembles, at one time employing Regina Carter, and the’ve appeared on Guided by Voices albums.

It doesn’t look like Sequence Girls was ever reissued on CD, but it is distributed digitally through CD Baby.

Tags: soldier string quartet, vinyl find