(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Bundy Brown, the former bassist of Tortoise (and before that of Bastro and Gastr Del Sol), launched a career as a producer and soundtrack composer and created the project Directions In Music (Thrill Jockey, 1996) with James Warden on guitar and Doug Scharin (of Him, Rex and June Of 44, former drummer of Codeine) on drums—a trio of instrumental rock inspired by blues-rock and country-rock but with the more experimental spirit of the 1990s and the approach of a jazz arranger. The equally evocative Echoes (Soul Static Sound, 1997) is credited to Directions, who in this case would be Brown, Jeff Parker, and John Herndon.

Pullman is an acoustic quartet that continues in that direction, composed of Bundy Brown, Curtis Harvey (guitarist of Rex), Chris Brokaw (former drummer of Codeine and guitarist of Come), and Douglas McComb (bassist of Eleventh Dream Day and Tortoise). The music of Turnstyles & Junkpiles (Thrill Jockey, 1998) continues Brown’s Directions In Music project: a slow and restrained “solfeggio” of repetitive figures entrusted to the guitars, effectively constituting the manual, artisanal counterpart of a hypothetical process of sampling and manipulation of the harmonic stereotypes of country and blues. The album collects compositions dating from 1993 to 1997, orchestrated for guitar, bass, mandola, and dobro.
The project closely recalls those of John Fahey and Leo Kottke from the 1970s, with the only difference being an even stronger emphasis on trance. The result thus replicates that gentle balance between the domestic and the metaphysical (To Hold Down A Shadow), that affectionate tone (Barefoot), that lyrical sense of “neighborhood” (Deer Hill), and that tender irony (the “Mitteleuropean” waltz of Lyasnya). The acoustic alter egos of these refined composers of alternative rock sketch a very different inner portrait—less convoluted and less daring, much closer to their roots.

The post-rock supergroup Pullman reunited for Viewfinder (Thrill Jockey, 2001), a set of acoustic instrumentals that makes one hope for a Kingston Trio reunion.