Bats in the Lavender Sky offers nine hypnotic and minimalist electric guitar solos by Bay Area veteran experimental improviser and sound artist Ernesto Diaz-Infante, recorded at his San Francisco apartment, next door to the fabled Jefferson Airplane house and studios, between January to March 2022. These short guitar pieces correspond with krautrock, minimalism, psychedelic electro-acoustic drones, noise and even raw kind of techno.

The title of the album is borrowed from the opening line of a poem by Salvadoran poet and activist Javier Zamora («It was dusk for kilometers and bats in the lavender sky, / like spiders when a fly is caught, began to appear», from Saguaros). The cover artwork by fellow guitarist Cam Lofstrand intensifies the suggestive atmosphere of this album.

Ghosts of the JA is already the third full-length collaboration of Texan drummer-percussionist Lisa Cameron with Diaz-Infante, recorded live at the same location as Bats in the Lavender Sky in June 2019. Cameron plays here also lap steel and electronics and Diaz-Infante fretless electric guitar and the multi-effect Line 6 Pod. Here Cameron’s delay-and-feedback-tinged percussion and lap steel melt within Diaz-Infante’s blistered, effects-mediated electric guitar and suggest a hypnotic, hallucinatory entity that often makes it also impossible who produces these sounds.

The six, slow-burning improvised pieces highlight the intrepid approaches of these idiosyncratic improvisers and sound artists, who are not shy of psychedelic collisions of distorted and noisy sounds. Cameron and Diaz-Infante manage to create an unsettling and untimely atmosphere that may be haunted by the Ghosts of the JA and clearly dives deep into a ghostly dream world.

Eyal Hareuveni

Ernesto Diaz-Infante (electric guitar, fretless electric guitar, Line 6 POD), Lisa Cameron (lap steel, percussion, electronics)