Sometimes a trip can produce more than a few photos,
a good story, and a souvenir t-shirt. Songwriter/vocalist
Carla Bozulich and guitarist
Nels Cline
took a two-week trip through the Pacific Northwest and got an album out
of it. Scarnella (1998, Smells Like Records), the name of both the
group that Bozulich and
Cline
formed and the album that resulted from their partnership, was born on a
trip that contained the beginnings of their work as a duo, four shows,
six days of recording and mixing, and a whole lot of songwriting and
improvising.
Bozulich and
Cline had worked together before in
the Geraldine Fibbers and both had stretched themselves in partnerships with other musicians: Bozulich in another band,
Ethyl Meatplow, and
Cline in the
Nels Cline Trio, and in collaborations with
Mike Watt,
Thurston Moore, and
Charlie Haden.
However, both the unusual circumstances of the creation of this album
and extra roles that each member had to play (Bozulich on bass and
sampling keyboard,
Cline
on drums) meant that this was a project that existed on the edge of
their previous experiences. The result was a sound that alternated
between the ethereal space of the open road and the noisy organized
chaos of random improvisation.