Back Catalog: Lateduster
Easy Pieces (2004)
Lateduster has the sheen of a true Twin Cities supergroup. It formed in 1999 out of impromptu meetings and collaborations and became Cropduster, a six-piece experiment that blended guitars with drums and DJs. A ridiculous amount of talent to be concentrated in one expansive, ambient, and genre-swirling instrumental outfit, the lineup later fell to a quartet: James Everest (currently of Vicious Vicious and Roma di Luna), Andrew Broder (of Fog and more recently HeatdeatH), Bryan Olson (of living in California and being a jazz bad-ass), and Martin Dosh (of Dosh—oh, and Andrew Bird's band).
Easy Pieces was released on Miami-based Merck Records and collects work from a few previously self-released discs into one handy package. It's striking how well the music—some of it now more than seven years old—holds up. “Shaker Flicker” rolls like a shuffling, summery outtake from Tortoise’s brilliant TNT with a double helping of Dosh’s fluid drumming, which pushes things in many directions at once. It takes its sweet time getting to the real hook, but when it drops at the two-minute mark in the form of a circling, descending guitar line, the fuzzy, bright backdrop comes into sharp focus and lifts the tune to a new level. It’s even possible to hear a little of Dosh’s knack for simple, seesawing, stepwise patterns in the tune’s melody.
In “Keno,” turntables come through strongly, and Broder cuts the rhythm for most of the song. The spare, beautiful “Milovanova (For Vera)” is built around the indeterminate and oddly melodic scraping of a pick against a guitar’s wound strings; “A Gallon Of Hope” opens with a sample of a man speaking at some kind of convention or ceremony that’s reminiscent of DJ Shadow’s work with dialogue on Endtroducing.
To say that Easy Pieces is the perfect record for any occasion feels like a QVC pitch, but it’s true, largely because of the way it simultaneously conveys care and rangy experimentalism. During a long drive late at night, through headphones on a downtown bus, or for an intimate gathering of friends, Lateduster’s musical moods make fine accompaniment for just about any circumstance.
The Legacy: It’s not precisely the Rosetta Stone, but it’s easy to hear the emergence of Fog’s rampant pastiche techniques as well as Dosh’s cascading rhythms and deceptively elegant melodies. It’s also appropriate to cite Lateduster as a forebear to important local instrumental-ambient bands like Poor Line Condition, Tiki Obmar, and Tarlton.
Here's Lateduster performing "Grunting And Walking Around In A Circle" live:
