Photo by Noel Woodford
Guitarist and composer Prawit Siriwat’s debut jazz-rock album, Blueberry, melds thrashy riffs, tactile soundscapes, and contemplative melodies. Siriwat presents a sonic archive of a decade grappling with New York’s creative music scene, told with virtuosity and clever improvisations. Brimming with energy and crunchy guitar tones, Blueberry evinces the thrill of synthesizing mode and meaning in order to invent freely among them.
Siriwat is joined by his best friends and longtime collaborators Daniel Durst on bass and Abel Tabares on drums. These musicians connected through New York’s jazz scene in the 2010s, and their overlapping terroirs can be heard in their synchronicity and improvisation. On tracks such as “Clank” and “0717”, this trio stretches the borders of form and context by deliberately fusing funky house beats with atonal phrases. “WTFU” displays the trio’s command of noise with its heavy bass lines, finger-twisting unisons, and precise polyrhythmic drumming. These metal elements are also heard on “Diomedes” with its ominous verses and soaring chorus. The album’s softer numbers, “Currents” and “Lullaby”, layer vocal-like themes and subtle harmonic shifts, awash with emotion. “House Sitting Secretly” features a completely open section where the trio’s interplay really shines. The final song “Season Finale Montage” is the shimmery soundtrack to the end of an imaginary sitcom with its fingerpicked intro and triumphant refrain.
“I recorded this album just before moving to California in 2021,” Siriwat related. “Blueberry is a medley illustrative of that personal and cultural era – the cross-pollination of artistic ideas, the prismatic search for my creative voice, the noise and pace of being young and open.”