Abney, John Calvin
Tourist
Using his personal portable studio, this is no troubadour with a busted guitar story, instead, Abney grows his songs, weaving drum machines, samplers, and synthesizers into the songs, ?eshing the recordings out with sole collaborator John Moreland, who performed his parts and mixed from his own studio, using the internet to create the album over even longer distances. Informed by much of the music Abney was listening to at the time (from the Japanese pop maestro Haruomi Hosono, Happy End, and Elton John through indie rock band War On Drugs), Tourist was equally, de?nitively shaped by the landscape itself, speci?cally, the sights and sounds of the redwood forests and cold coasts of Northern California where he spent his time during a harrowing ?re season, idling in the countryside, accompanied by Steinbeck's rich travel memoir Travels With Charley and a collection of Hemingway short stories, both given to him by friends in Oklahoma. The western wild?res burning ominously through the dusk and dawn crept their way into the sounds and stories like the smoke did in through his windows and door