VI. ABRAM TABER is a musician’s musician. He plays in almost every band, a few of which are The Musical Theatre, Verre, Glancy, Dubler & Taber and Sound w/Sound. Past projects are almost too many to list, but the highlights include Parafin Section, Pyotr, the Slurred Murrays and Abermathy.

This year Abram prepared an album Two Nineteen, all of which was recorded on February 19th for the 2009 RPM challenge. Some of the pieces were completely improvised, and others borrowed from pre-composed themes which were augmented through improvisation. The track here presented, Six, is of the latter category. When I first listened to Two Nineteen, I was busy preparing an elaborate dinner to celebrate the beginning of spring. I could not imagine better background music, which Abram will surely appreciate as a fellow lover of good food done right.

I’m one of those kids who always wanted to be a virtuoso musician, and I spent the first two years of college majoring in—of all things—the classical guitar. I sucked. But if nothing else those classes taught me how to recognize who’s real and who’s not. Abram is probably the finest musician I’ve ever encountered, which is by no means hyperbole. His ear is unmatched, and his complex musical taste synthesizes minimalism, psychedelia and noise all the while experimenting with pop timbres, subverting and distorting them at will. At the very base of his work there is that same explosive energy that could be found in Paris with Musique Concréte, and perhaps, in the end, that’s what Abram does: he arranges sounds—themselves artifacts of our fractured civilization—and weaves them into a tapestry that approaches something like consciousness.