"The improvisations laid down by guitarist Phil Venable and drummer Tommy Jackson on Wilderness are stark, powerful and uncompromising. The three compositions on the album were cut in a single marathon session at Hondo Creek Studios, with engineer Mike Nicholson. Venable and Jackson produced the sessions, keeping the sound raw and primal.

"I think we all hoped things would get better in the 2020's, but it seems like we're lost in a haze of fascism and violence," Venable said. "The past year was a thicket of conflict and death. I don't think the human race knows the way forward, so we're stuck in a vicious circle of retribution. These songs sprang out of a desire to see some kind of hope, despite all the death and injustice.

"Star City Survivor doesn't rehearse," Venable continued, "but that's not to say we aren't thinking about our playing, or how to communicate with each other and the listener. Themes definitely popped up, either consciously or unconsciously."

"I'd say Wilderness is a noise record," Jackson said. "Phil and I both have eclectic music tastes. We draw inspiration from a lot of different influences like free jazz, ambient, no wave, and other forms of experimental or avant-garde music."

The set opens with "Loss." Slow, brooding distorted guitar notes, with a long sustain, are supported by hissing cymbals and random bursts of bass drum and tom toms. The guitar pulls you down into a pit of grief, with the drums expressing anger and frustration. Halfway through, Venable unwinds a short, repeating melodic figure against Johnsons fractured rhythms, but the tension remains high until everything slowly fades out.

"I listened to 'Alabama' by John Coltrane a lot this past year," Venable said. "It's the song he wrote to express his feelings about the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, carried out by The Klan in 1963. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to deal with humanity's inhumanity. This is one response."

"A Descending Visitation" was the first tune Johnson and Venable tracked for the album. They weren't sure it was anything but a warm up, but it exploded into an exploration of avant-garde noise. Venable's buzzing guitar notes slip into some frenzied rock shredding, while Johnson's drumming breaks the tempo into scattered fragments. Venable alternates between brief melodic phrases and waves of feedback. Johnson moves freely, never settling down into a single rhythm for more than a few bars, matching Venable's aggressive attack.

Venable calls "In A Barren And Howling Waste" the "primal scream of the recording." It opens quietly with bent, sitar-like notes from the guitar and Johnson's drums rumbling down in the mix, like storm clouds building up before a downpour. The guitar noise slowly increases, veering into blues and rock, drenched with overtones, while Jackson fills the background with snare rolls, snapping cymbals and kick drum accents. The tempo slowly increases moving into prog rock territory, with hints of '60s metal in the mix. After another spattering of cymbals, the guitar adds wha-wha notes and effects from a Danelectro Back Talk pedal, producing a dark psychedelic drone and rolling flurries of notes. Jackson's snare rolls, bass kicks and cymbals suggest a sprint to dodge the downpour and lightning. The tension between guitar and drums remains relentless to the end, with no suggestion of release. To close, Venable adds short jolts of noise, with melodic fragments that suggest the WWI song "Over There," slowly descending into a steam of feedback, underscored by Johnson's sizzling cymbals and crackling snares. "This track conveys the 'wilderness' of the title," Venable said. "I think we've all been lost in it, to some degree, for the past few years. Hopefully, we'll we come out on the other side, with the help of our faith and the music."

The duo's debut, Orbital Decay, came out of a more impromptu session. Venable and Jackson had met each other playing in another project, but didn't know each other well. They hadn't played together often before going in to record, so the feeling was more tentative. Wilderness was informed by the bond they forged playing together over the course of a year.

When they play live, the music is just as adventurous. "As you might imagine, we're loud," Venable said. "A live show tends to be different. We might add people on trumpet, sax or additional percussion and improvise as much as we can. I'm curious to see what we recorded for Wilderness becomes during a live performance. They'll probably turn into pieces that shrink or expand, depending on the night."

Phil Venable has years of experience on both acoustic and electric bass and guitar and has played in a wide variety of rock, jazz and improvisational settings. He runs Soul City Sounds, a label that's produced jazz and spoken word albums by a wide variety of musicians and poets, including North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, free jazz trio Tragic Assembly, Ken Moshesh, HoOdEleCtuaL and Venable himself.

Tommy Jackson was inspired to play after hearing the trio of albums put out by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. His parents signed him up for drum lessons when he was a boy and the drums became a part of his life. He played guitar and bass in rock bands during his teenage years and vibraphone and piano in college. He's released several albums of jazz, rock and R&B and plays classic rock tunes with the Reeves House Band."

"The members of this guitar/drums duo live in North Carolina's Triangle, a conglomeration of metropolitan areas that contains three major research universities and several thriving cities. So, it's fair to say that Star City Survivor's second album is named for a desired state, not the location its members actually inhabit. But if Wilderness is where they want to be, rest assured, they know how to get there.

Guitarist Phil Venable opens "Loss," the first of the record's three tracks, with a sequence of sullen, grimy figures. His phrasing and penchant for fuzz tones root this music in rock; he understands that there are moments where an unclean buzz is the best thing to play, and he goes there with conviction. But from the first cymbal flourish, drummer Tommy Jackson makes it clear that his music is not confined to one stylistic cubbyhole. He hits hard and fills up space, but his surging attack creates shape and movement without locking into a groove.

"Loss" lasts nearly 10 minutes. It's hardly an amuse-bouche, but it's still the shortest thing on Wilderness. The music increases in dimension, intensity and resources, expanding to incorporate dustbowl-bleak melodicism and acid-rain ambience into its belching volcanic storm. While Jackson and Venable don't necessarily need technology to bulk up their sound, they're not afraid to take advantage of it; some delay units get a workout on "In A Barren And Howling Waste," running slippery loops against the prevailing deluge to hallucinatory effect. But then Venable steps on the wah-wah pedal, unleashing a barrage that carries all before it."-Bill Meyer