fter countless CDR and cassette outings, Davenport has finally landed on CD proper. Appropriately, the result is a stylistic left turn. The Madison collective is known for group improvisations set to tape on the spot. Lots of people, a single moment in time. That formula is inverted for Rabbits Foot Propeller. Though released under the Davenport name, the album is the solo work of core member Clay Ruby. And more importantly, recording technology plays a central role in Rabbits Foot Propeller. The album was created with a tape recorder with its erase head removed. This allowed for infinite overdubs but prevented Ruby from monitoring previous tracks. The result is a deep, thick record lacking the group magic so crucial to prior Davenport releases. Luckily Rabbits Foot Propeller conjures enough haunted atmosphere and lonesome madness to compensate for the loss.

Though overdubs aren’t exactly breaking news in the music world, Ruby uses them to a novel end. The intimacy of his field recordings, the privacy of his strained folk songs, and the coherency of this tape-world hammer home the fact that Rabbits Foot Propeller documents time.

Ruby could’ve recorded until the tape decomposed, leaving this record an impenetrable miasma of sound. But he fashions a restrained and coherent narrative instead and, in so doing, uncovers a wonderful metaphor for memory. A tape recorder with an erase head removed…so much time, but no way to revisit it. Slices of experience, drifting atop one another like falling leaves, and decaying just as quickly. Memory as a sedimental process, in which experience compresses into fertile layers, seeds of self-awareness sprout, and a story of self blossoms.

Rabbits Foot Propeller is Ruby’s story. Sudden cuts hit like epiphanies or recovered traumas. Semi-syllabic vocals vie with birdsong and forest noise, no single voice outdoing the others—an attempt to find harmony between human and environment, between inside and out, to create something that would render the boundaries meaningless. Woodwinds and strings echo from the past to the future, fading at horizon’s limit. Rabbits Foot Propeller is a document of fragility and loss, longing and loneliness, all validated by rare moments of bliss.

No notion of genre captures what Ruby is doing. Borrowing from musique concrete, revivalist folk, space rock atmospheres, drone, and a dogged avant garde ear for texture, Ruby recombines these familiar referents into something too personal to be pigeonholed. Bells, airplane noise, the noise of button-fumbling, and moist, muffled breath breed unsettling ambient atmospheres during “Root System” and on into “Calm is Steep” (track listing can feel somewhat arbitrary here). On “Agwe Breath,” a dour folk song is trampled by footsteps and engulfed with incidental clatter, becoming all the more poignant as it disappears. “Candletops” is the drone track, sounding like a fuzzed-out, close-up recording of a liturgical chant played over a expedition into the dank catacombs. A revivalist stomp and blissed-out sludge chords fight for transcendence in “Dead for a Sun.” Both are rewarded by a splash of chimes only to be punished with the air-conditioner textures of “At Last Drift is Cast,” a self-consciously ugly track that refuses to be beautified by the futile flutes blowing against it. All of this delight and debris, smashed next to and over each other.

Rabbits Foot Propeller is certainly a ponderous record, alternately abrasive and inviting, naked and swathed in sound. It makes you a voyeur and then prosecutes you for perversity. It opens a window into the human mind, only to reveal that it’s workings are far more inscrutable within than they seemed from without.