Hug (Gyan Riley, Devendra Banhart, Noah Georgeson) - In the Round

Hug The three musicians who wrote and recorded Hug—Devendra Banhart, Gyan Riley and Noah Georgeson— are not related by blood, but they sure act like it. Friends for decades, it only takes a few minutes for their family/non-family dynamics to reveal themselves: “I don’t even like these people,” Devendra jokes during a recent video call. “I didn’t choose them; I love them. They’re my brothers, my family. It’s irrevocable.” Over the course of the conversation, the three tease each other as much as they sing each other’s praises. Noah and Devendra gently rib Gyan for being the prodigy of the group; all three are retiringly self-deprecating about their own role in the making of this largely instrumental new album. Whatever it is that connects these three, you can hear it in the banter as much as you can in the music. The record is almost like a bait and switch: You read the spine and—especially if you’re familiar with the work of Devendra or Gyan or Noah—you think, this is a guitar trio. But Hug doesn’t particularly sound like any of these artists, and if it’s a guitar trio, then it’s one without too many guitars. Hug is more than the sum of its parts—because these artists know how to play with each other. For Gyan and Noah, the tether goes back to childhood itself. They both grew up in the same remote, hippie town in Northern California, Nevada City, which was once one of the epicenters of crystals and all things New Age culture. Gyan spent his youth surrounded by experimental and minimalist music (clock the last name), and as a boy gravitated toward the guitar. “Being thirteen and completely obsessed with classical guitar,” he remembers, “there were few people I could bond with over that… Basically just my teacher and Noah.” Noah remembers being amazed by Gyan’s skill, even as a kid. He was just as relieved as Gyan to have a friend with whom he could share his passion for classical guitar, a fringe obsession in their fringe hometown. Noah grew up in a cabin built by his family; there were regular bear and mountain lion sightings in the woods behind the house, but he never got so much as a bee sting. “My parents had a guru instead of going to church,” Noah remembers, “otherwise, it was all very normal.” After they left home, their lives moved on parallel tracks: Gyan continued on as an artist and touring musician, releasing several albums of his own, and collaborating with musicians as various as Arooj Aftab, John Zorn, Paul Simon, and his father, Terry. Noah, meanwhile, moved to San Francisco where he established his own experimental music bona fides, studying with Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, and Alvin Curran. From there, he helped create much of the music that defined the aughts, including several albums with Devendra, who first crossed his path when he was a teenage art school dropout. Devendra may have come into the picture later (not much later), but he fit in with ease. Much of Devendra’s own childhood rhymed with Noah’s and Gyan’s: he grew up in Venezuela and Southern California in a family that also had a guru; he took to guitar early, busking on the streets instead of going to class. It would be many years before Noah’s two friends—two influential poles of his musical life—would meet. But by the time they did, years later in Brooklyn, they were primed for it. “Everything was sparkling and I felt like a little kid,” Devendra remembers, “and so I knew—we must play.” Hug was written and recorded organically, without a grand plan, and is full of the childlike wonder that these three bring out in each other. At times ambient, at times enigmatic, each song flows into the other, moving across folk tradition and genre, as Devendra, Gyan, and Noah take turns leading. From the opening frogs on “Cow With Half Moon Parasol,” the natural world takes center stage. Discrete places on this planet—places, we can infer, hold some significance to these composers—color the soundscape: Sounds from one sacred hill in India, sounds from a river running through Venezuela and Colombia. Animated by the playfulness between these three brothers, the eternal place of childhood never feels far off. On first listen, the song “Sarva Mangalam” sounds like an ancient Hindu chant repurposed into an updated hymn with guitar, sonica, kalimba, and percussion. Yet if you listen closer, the lyrics comprise only two lines: “Sarva Mangalam,” a sacred Sanskrit greeting, and “leche condensada,” Spanish for condensed milk. “We wanted it to sound like a dusty cassette found in an ashram’s giftshop,” Noah said, a nod to the New Age influence of their collective youth. Though the album itself came together in three weeks, there are hints scattered across the tracks that they’ve been working towards this collective for much longer. The final song contains a loop that Noah and Devendra first created twenty years ago, back when they were living together in Venice Beach, a fragment of a song they never knew how to finish until now. And in the album’s final moments, voices can be heard, just barely, crying out, “Well I went down…!” They leave us with another unfinished fragment—perhaps a signal of future projects to come.