Jeff T. Byrd - "Nighty Night"

The experimental composer combines field recordings, improvisational music, and unearthed cassettes from his late father to create an astounding, unsettling new album.

Jeff T. Byrd is no stranger to experimental music and unique artistic moves. As one half of the no-wave absurdist duo Budokan Boys (featuring Michael Jeffrey Lee as his partner in crime), Byrd revels in embracing the bizarre. But while the music he’s created with Lee has often been imbued with elements of synth-pop and even stong melodic hooks, his latest solo venture is a deep dive into some rather unsettling sonic territory. 

With Nighty Night – released on the Irish cassette label Fort Evil Fruit – Byrd uses cassettes from his late father, primarily from the 1980s, recorded by the elder Byrd on a handheld Panasonic cassette recorder. His father seemed to embrace the concept of field recordings and often recorded random sounds: commercial airline cabins, bus station announcements, neighborhood thunderstorms. These recordings – which vary wildly in sound quality, adding to the ambience – are combined with his son’s own field recordings and musical improvisations on piano, saxophone, and synthesizer. The older recordings aid in the nostalgic value of the album, which mourns Byrd’s father’s loss – he passed away from cancer a few years ago – and are an odd celebration of his life and the younger Byrd’s childhood. The final compositions, Byrd explains on his Bandcamp page, “exist somewhere between autobiography and dream.” 

Thanks to the extensive liner notes on Nighty Night, specific sources, times, and locations of the recordings are described whenever possible, which helps put things in proper context. “Looking for a Man” combines microcassette recordings of singing and whistling, “found in a pile of water-damaged junk on Piety Street, in New Orleans.” Trains, radio transmissions, the dripping of water from a spout, are all assembled in an odd, but weirdly intimate collage. 

The industrial sounds that form a primitive backdrop on “Holy Cross” are mixed with piano and deeply eerie synthesizers and is something of an instrumental bridge between tracks that contain singing and speaking, such as “Panasonic.” Named after Byrd’s father’s cassette recorder, this track begins with somber, knotty piano notes and soon becomes a spoken word montage courtesy of a leather goods manufacturer who traveled to Dallas to meet with the elder Byrd to present his company’s services. The second half of this epic track features rain, piano, somber saxophone wailing, and the clicking of a camera shutter that would stand up beautifully against any 20th century musique concrete pieces. 

Whether it’s intentional or not, the track “Dad’s Porn” is actually quite hilarious. The title explains it all: when he was about 12 years old, Byrd and his brother found a stash of their father’s VHS pornography tapes, which are widely sampled here in all their tacky ‘80s glory. The gaudy music, awkward dialog, and yes, the moaning and dirty talk are all presented here, with the lousy tracking static from the tapes providing additional era-appropriate ambient noise. But while “Dad’s Porn” is an awkward, if realistic snapshot of Byrd’s childhood, “Goodwater, Alabama 1982” returns to more unsettling territory, as Byrd’s musical improvisations get more and more dark, and are eventually joined by more of his father’s field recordings. This time, the sounds of an Alabama factory – the location of a 1982 business trip – add an industrial element to the collage. 

Nighty Night closes with the lengthy title track, and is a mishmash of several different sonic sources, including thunderstorms, answering machine messages, disembodied recordings of singing, weird, synth-like squalls, and the ever-present minor-key piano notes. Byrd has a unique penchant for taking existing field recordings and placing them in a context that makes them almost unbearably haunting. 

Thanks to his father’s curiosity with recording techniques, Jeff T. Byrd is able to reach into his past to create a variety of amazing sonic experiments in the present. Nighty Night is an odd, deeply fascinating tribute to both childhood memories and artistic adventure.