George Cartwright's GloryLand PonyCat feat. Adam Linz & Alden Ikeda - Black Ants Crawling (2024)

All the elements are there: the freeform style, the cerebral explorations that never quite leave melody behind, the inventive, highly-skilled, highly-sensitive musicians—it’s got saxophones, George. Yes, I know, Funhouse has saxophones, but it’s different.


Okay. Just for the moment let’s lay aside your vision of this as the most violent, frantic heavy rock record ever made. Can you do that? Just as a hypothetical?


It’s got all the earmarks of a really fine jazz record. It starts out with one of your by-now trademarked end-of-the-year laments, which frankly have always sounded more jazz than proto-punk to me. It’s alive, it’s always happening right now. The music is made of the listening of its players, that’s what you hear in between the notes. It has that keen sense of mood, the weight of atmosphere.


Speaking of which, how do you expect me to write "happy" liner notes about this music? Was that the word? You said you wanted something "a little upbeat," for a change. Did you send me the wrong CD? Evocative, yes. The music has a memory. It gives you memories you didn’t know you had, from before your time, from other points of view. Sad? At times, sure! Playful? Okay! Plangent. Poised, stalking. Fleet and full of reverie and recriminations—all of these things. But I think your plan for this as a let-the-good-times-roll, rent-party, pass-the-eightball, kick-out-the-jams, burn-down-the-landlord, beer-ball anthem is wide of the mark. I just don’t hear this as a party record, George.

_Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a different music altogether. This music listens to itself, and finally listens through itself. It reminds me of the void surrounding each note, and yet taken together those notes do warm the void, a little.

_Not, I’m afraid, a realistic answer to the most titanic expression of ill-will ever committed to tape

The bass and drums are as melodic as the sax. They comment on the sax, they sympathize, they harmonize with it, they mock and reject it, they create landscapes around it, and sometimes, for moments, they all dissolve into the cool night—Oh—now I see, a slip of paper falls out of the CD sleeve...



Song titles, okay, and I see we’ve got Adam Linz on bass and Alden Akida on drums, and you, George Cartwright, on saxes. That’s a start!
By the way, I like the crowd noise and that confusion-on-the-bandstand business you edited in. I don’t know if it’ll fool anyone, but it really adds to the thing. As I said, the record definitely has a live "feel".


There’s nothing else in your note, but reading between the lines of your heated scrawl, I don’t see this as "the most brutal act of unwarranted rage ever conceived."



Biker meth party instant classic? No.


Taken on its own terms, I love it. A third listening (now that my neighbor’s out) makes me want to hear each note again at the same time I’m hearing it. I’ve been staring at the notes in the air for a while when I realize they’re not in the air, they’re in the rough finish of the wall, which now, along with everything else, is made of them.

- Mike DeCapite

George Cartwright - alto and tenor saxophones
Alden Ikeda - drums
Adam Linz - bass