Credit: Andrew Gottlieb
Vinny Golia and Nathan Hubbard
Multi-instrumentalist Nathan Hubbard has announced two new improvisational albums being released via his Castor & Pollux imprint. One, Hunter’s Moon, was recorded in 2016 as a duo with woodwind player Vinny Golia, and the other, Lattice Trust, was performed in 2014 as a quartet featuring GE Stinson, Steuart Liebig and Alex Cline. The former is one continuous piece, while the latter features three separate performances. Both are entirely improvisational, however, which led Hubbard to decide to release them at the same time.
“I thought, these two records, maybe they go together,” he says in a phone interview. “It’s kind of organic how they both feature musicians from L.A., they’re both live recordings, they’re both improvised.”
The two releases have their share of commonalities, but they’re also somewhat different musically, both because of the ensemble size and because of the approach to each performance. It’s also because each recording features musicians from different backgrounds, or simply the nature of improvisational music not being pre-planned.
“They’re both pretty dense,” he says. “Clearly there’s my stamp on them. But they’re both pretty different. There’s some stuff that’s more melodic, and some that’s more like a drone.”
On Saturday, April 22, Hubbard and Golia will perform a record release show at Bread and Salt for Hunter’s Moon. However, after that, Hubbard says he’ll be moving on to the next thing. He says he’s just not the type of musician to revisit music he’s made in the past all that much, and the size of his discography on Bandcamp seems to back that up.
“I have friends that like to revisit things from the past,” he says. “It’s good for some people, but it’s not really what I do. At some point I just have to move on. I’m always interested in pushing on and trying new things.”