October 2024
It’s easy to fall into the trap of returning again and again to the artists who have already caught your ear. Take, for example, saxophonists Chris Potter, Charles Lloyd, and Miguel Zenón. When these endlessly expressive musicians release new albums, which they do at least once a year, I feel compelled to listen to them. Dozens upon dozens of other great musicians I follow, across a wide spectrum of instruments and music genres, also release albums regularly, and as a professional critic, I receive an average of 400 unsolicited recordings a year too, mostly as digital files. As much as I’d love to, I can’t possibly listen to them all.
I don’t have an exact formula for sussing out talent. Certain artists just strike a chord with me and pique my interest, and if I am sufficiently intrigued, I’ll follow them as they mature and develop. It’s mostly intuition, but I also pay attention to what my peers are listening to. Sometimes, it’s just happenstance: a liking for the compositions an artist covers, the supporting players, or maybe simply the cover art. Sometimes it’s a random selection.
That said, I always have my radar on for guitarists I haven’t heard before, which is how I discovered Sam Wilson, who lives in rural Nova Scotia; Juanma Trujillo, a Venezuelan who recently moved to Spain after a decade in New York City; and the duo of Dustin Wong and Greg Uhlmann, based in Los Angeles. These nascent musicians released new albums this year that deserve a wide audience.
Sam Wilson and her recordings—I’ve now heard three—caught my attention because she studied at the institute established by my late drummer friend Jerry Granelli, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Originally from Ontario, Wilson has been living on Canada’s east coast for more than a decade. In 2021, she won the Paul Cram Creation Award, named after another Nova Scotian, a prominent composer, performer, and producer. While it was the connection to those two musical giants that caught my attention, it was Wilson’s music that has held me in a warm embrace for months, particularly her self-released CD Wintertides. Composed during the winter of 2022 in two remote locations—Scotsburn, a small town on the northeast edge of Nova Scotia, and Galiano Island, on the Salish Sea, west of Vancouver—Wintertides features Wilson with bassist Geordie Hart and drummer Jen Yakamovich.
Juanma Trujillo’s sixth album, Howl (CD, Endectomorph Music EMM-021), features a half-dozen original compositions inspired by the close friendship between Trujillo and his band members: tenor saxophonist Kevin Sun, bassist Andrew Schiller, and drummer Matt Honor. Trujillo describes his accompaniment as providing the room to work on the details of his tunes, never letting the music feel safe or stale. From the first time the group played together, he remembers, the music had the immediacy and mood that he sought.
Dustin Wong and Greg Uhlmann’s Water Map (24-bit/48kHz WAV, Otherly Love Records OLR010) captures the duo’s penchant for smeary electronics, loops, and a gauzy soundstage, an affinity that gives no hint of their backgrounds.
Born in Hawaii of Japanese and Chinese lineage, Wong considers his musical style to have been influenced by artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, John Fahey, and Brian Eno, as well as by surf rock. His professional background includes stints with the bands Ecstatic Sunshine and Ponytail and with Takako Minekawa as a duo, in Tokyo.
Uhlmann, a Chicago native who has lived in Los Angeles for several years, cites guitarist Jeff Parker as a major influence. Uhlmann has worked with Perfume Genius, Hand Habits, Fell Runner, Typical Sister, and Miya Folick.
The broad scope of these three albums is ideally suited to a set of active speakers as powerful and sonically detailed as Triangle’s Capella system ($2999, all prices in USD), which Gordon Brockhouse reviewed on August 1 on SoundStage! Simplifi.
Each of these elegant speakers measures 15″H × 7.9″W × 12.4″D and weighs a hefty 18.7 pounds. They are offered in four glossy finishes: Black Star, Astral Blue, Brown Nebula, and Space White. I mounted the Capellas on the equally elegant Triangle S05 stands ($399/pair), which are available in five complementary colors. The S05 incorporates an interior channel to run cables through, which enhances the speaker’s clean, smart appearance.
Each Capella speaker includes a 6.3″ cellulose-pulp midrange-bass driver and a 1″ horn-loaded magnesium-dome tweeter, each powered by a 50W class-D amplifier. Specified frequency response is 42Hz–22kHz (±3dB).
A line-level input (RCA) on each speaker allows a preamplifier to be wired to the Capella system, but its intended mode of operation is wireless streaming. To that end, it incorporates a Wireless Speaker and Audio (WiSA) module that can receive 24-bit/96kHz digital audio from a WiSA source, such as the Bluetooth- and Wi-Fi-enabled Platin Stereo Hub, which accompanies the system. The 1.6″H × 6.7″W × 3.9″D Stereo Hub has one coaxial (RCA) and three optical (TosLink) S/PDIF inputs, as well as a USB-B port for connecting to a computer, an HDMI ARC port for HDTV, a pair of line-level RCA jacks, and a 3.5mm stereo input. The Stereo Hub also supports a wide range of streaming protocols, including Apple AirPlay 2, Google Chromecast, Spotify Connect, and UPnP/DLNA, and it is a Roon Ready device. A mixed-media library such as mine is not a problem for the Stereo Hub.
Triangle goes the distance when it comes to pre-configuration and ease of setup. A quick-start guide is provided, and the user manual is available for download. I carefully followed the setup instructions and successfully connected the Stereo Hub to my Wi-Fi network. But when I tried to stream audio from my MacBook Pro via AirPlay, all I could get was a short burst of sound. I never figured out the cause. Frustrated, but not defeated, I switched to Bluetooth, and that worked just fine.
Heeding Gordon’s experience, I used the supplied Zen microphone to set up the Stereo Hub’s Room EQ for my average-size living room. Later, once the summer heat had lifted, I moved the Capellas to my much-smaller attic office and set up Room EQ for that space. Adaptability to different listening spaces is truly invaluable in hi-fi gear that gets moved around. My living room has an 8.5′ tongue-and-groove wooden ceiling and a lot of hard surfaces. My office ceiling is just 6′6″ high, and the wooden floor is mostly covered in a prized heirloom rug. It’s a snug space with little reverberation. In both rooms, the speakers were 8′ from my listening position, about 7′ apart.
Even without using EQ, the Capella speakers sounded remarkably good—full-bodied and rich across the audioband. They provided a consistently satisfying listening experience with a widely diverse range of recordings and allowed a deep dive into those three new guitar recordings.
Early in the spring, I received a copy of Wilson’s Wintertides and was well acquainted with the recording by the time the Capella system arrived. Deep familiarity with a piece of music can be an obstacle to critical listening, but these French speakers enabled me to hear this recording with fresh ears. That’s no small indicator of clarity and transparency in any piece of gear.
The album begins with “Light Through the Bend,” a loping piece that illustrates Wilson’s purity of tone and serves as a statement of purpose—a musical manifesto of what’s to come. It is an open-hearted exploration of mood and texture, with a strong balance between the three instruments. The second piece, “Sandlines,” introduces one of Wilson’s compositional signatures: the shifting role of the bass in counterpoint to her guitar. Hart begins the track with a four-note motif, which takes on new colors as Wilson adds grace notes. Then, the piece opens up as Hart shifts into an expanded role. “Sixthwave” is also underpinned by a dominant, repetitive bass motif, which in this case sets the foundation for some expressive drumming by Yakamovich. On three of the album’s strongest compositions—the title track, “The Moon Song,” and “Watersource”—Hart provides resonant, highly textured arco work. This really allowed the speakers to shine.
Produced and engineered by Darren van Niekerk, Wintertides showcases not only the exceptional talents of Wilson, Hart, and Yakamovich but also the Sonic Temple recording studio, a gorgeous facility housed in an 1820s-era Halifax building.
While Wilson’s trio is given to deeply resonant, meditative mood, Trujillo’s quartet is drawn to abstract expressionism, as the 32-minute Howl demonstrates with varicolored sonic brushstrokes across its acoustic canvas. One quality the two albums have in common is the fine balance between instruments on the soundstage. On Howl, in particular, that is no small feat, considering how mild and gentle Trujillo’s acoustic guitar is and how strong and abrasive Sun’s tenor sax is. Sun adds urgency to the music every time he steps forward, and Trujillo makes the most of it in his compositions and arrangements. Sun’s sax is used to great effect on Howl, especially in “Rojo,” “Regular,” and the title piece.
The aptly named “Catharsis” is built around a raging sax stream that showcases Sun’s circular-breathing technique. In stark contrast to this excoriating seven-minute maelstrom, the following track, “Regular,” with Trujillo’s mellow acoustic guitar and Matt Honor’s dark bells, seems like a tonic. Trujillo’s muted guitar is accompanied by a jittery, broken rhythm on “Instigation,” which wraps up the album at the 32-minute mark. I found that surprising. There’s a lot to absorb here. This album feels much longer.
It would be difficult to imagine a greater sonic and performative distance than that between Trujillo’s Howl and Wong and Uhlmann’s Water Map. If Howl is like having an overly caffeinated drink, Water Map is like immersing in a hot tub, with the water jets set to Pulse. At under 37 minutes, Water Map is closer to EP than to LP in running time, and it incorporates exotic sounds that will likely confound listeners expecting a typical album of guitar duets, sounds that bring to mind a thumb piano, muted gongs, Tibetan bowls. In fact, the only time I could positively identify a guitar was on “Transformation Ritual,” where soft strings drift down a flowing stream of electronic sound. Water Map is a sonic adventure that presented a great opportunity to probe the performance characteristics of the Capella system.
These new recordings from Wilson, Trujillo, and Wong and Uhlmann served to illustrate the many ways guitarists approach the instrument and shape its sound, and the Triangle Capella made that distinction all the more apparent. As always, keeping your ears open can pay great dividends.
. . . James Hale
jamesh@soundstagenetwork.com
