Tucson musicians find new voices in pandemic-era projects

Tucson singer-songwriter Connie Brannock was halfway through her second record when the pandemic struck earlier this year.

With government-ordered shutdowns and social-distancing restrictions, she couldn't get back into the studio to finish what she had started in late 2018 at Mike Levy's 11:11 Studios.

So Brannock switched gears and spent the early months of the year mixing and mastering the six songs that she and her bandmates — members of her Little House of Funk band and a handful of extras, including Levy on bass and percussion, harpist Christine Vivona and saxophonist Bryce Winston — had already recorded.

Last week, she released "Last Call" on Bandcamp (conniebrannock.bandcamp.com) and will release the six-song EP on Aug. 27 to other major streaming outlets.

Meanwhile, fellow singer-songwriter Ryan Alfred of Sweet Ghosts fame found himself with time on his hands. Normally he and his Sweet Ghosts partner/wife vocalist Katherine Byrnes would be doing a few shows a month and preparing for regional tour runs, but those days are temporarily on hold. 

Instead, Alfred drew influences from his well-traveled musical youth — a little jazz, some hip-hop and rock and electronica — and wrote and recorded his first ever solo recording.

Alfred will release his DIY EP "A Sudden Rush of Noise" on Tuesday, Aug. 25, through Bandcamp (bandcamp.com) and Soundcloud (soundcloud.com/ryan_alfred).

He describes the project as "a sprawling, colorful collage of analog synth washes, tweaked drum machine beats, melodic electric bass and sweeping themes."

The two projects have one thing in common: Both artists have unleashed new musical voices that give us unique insights into their diverse artistry.

She's more than a growler 

Brannock was taking her time on her second album, a follow-up to her late 2017 debut album "Lady on the Bus."

“I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined this would be what 2020 would look like," she said.

Brannock had hoped to release a full album in 2020, but instead she's putting the project out as two EPs. She hopes to release the second one in early 2021, once she and the band can return to the studio and finish recording.

"Last Call" is not the growly frenetically rocking blues that we have come to expect from Brannock, who has been a fixture on Tucson's blues stage for nearly a dozen years. It's more torch-song, reminiscent of the smoky nightclub haze of a well-oaked Scotch. 

The old-school R&B buoyancy of "Carry" leads to the jazzy torch song of "Morning Sun" — an ode to Tucson's brilliant sunrises, with Bryce Winston's soprano sax reminding you of the early, brassy days of Earth, Wind & Fire. 

Musicians are allowed to wander throughout the record, giving extended solos that shine equal spotlights on the vocals and instruments.

"I love to leave room for the music to really breathe," Brannock explained. "To me, I'm just an instrument. My voice is merely an instrument and I want to leave room in all of the songs to let instruments (sing)." 

She wrote the album on piano, drawing on her wide range of musical influences that includes singer-songwriters Carol King and Laura Nyro.

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"The singer-songwriter influences are really coming through on this record," she said. "It’s really kind of my more reflective side and what I listen to, what I really love."

One of the EP's highlights is the sultry homage to Tucson's "Miracle Mile," which Brannock released as a video in April. She returns to her bluesy growl on the rollicking "Been Thinking," which contemplates packing up and moving on to a new place in life and music.

"Don't know where I'm goin' / But I remember where I've been / Gonna make sure I never go that way again."

A solo and solitary journey 

There was a brief moment when life returned to something that resembled a bizarre form of semi-normal for Alfred.

Back in mid-May, he reunited — socially distanced, of course — with his friend and music collaborator Gabriel Sullivan to perform the long-awaited debut show of the pair's industrial horror-electronica rock project Gnosis. The show streamed live on No Audience, a months-old local outlet that launched two weeks earlier with Sullivan's band XIXA.

But after that, Alfred fell into his solitary pandemic routine.

"I started just realizing this is going to be a long time and we need to change things in our life," he said, which included getting together all of his equipment and setting up a home studio.

A solitary life, one imposed by forces beyond your control, is not all bad if you are a singer-songwriter.

It gives you time to look into your creative soul and mine the deep reaches of your musical memory to find a place where your creative juices start flowing in ways you haven't felt in a long time.

Alfred set up a daily practice of sketching out sounds and music and experimenting with innovations, including sampling with his iPhone. The result was "A Sudden Rush Of Noise,” his debut solo EP that he created and recorded by himself.

The record draws from Alfred's youthful influences of jazz and electronica, pop and rock. There are no vocals, just “a sprawling, colorful collage of analog synth washes, tweaked drum machine beats, melodic electric bass, and sweeping themes," he said in a written statement that describes the EP, which he recorded and mixed from home.

"Noise" opens with the haunting "What We Had" then borrows from hip-hop and electronica in "DD606swoon," with the percussive drive of skittering hi-hats and snare beats. A scorching groove cuts through the melodic title song before Alfred veers off to the rambling bass-rich breeze of "Solar Wind," with its dissonant chords that cut through the melody to create a balancing counterpoint. 

That dissonance re-emerges in "100 Grit Sunshine," perhaps the EP's most commercially electronica song. "Grit" takes part of its cues from Alfred's Gnosis influences before he brings you back to the land of calm with the keyboard fancy of "It's All Going to Disappear."

But beneath the calm are flashes of chaos born out of an underlying bass line that sounds like a race car whipping around the track at 110 before building to a quietly shimmering crescendo. 

"I think I was in a subconscious way just trying to dream outside of my little house because our life got really small kind of immediately and I found myself writing these big, sweeping pieces," Alfred said.

"I guess I was taking that scope of the dance music of the '90s that I love and scaling down the dance floor intensity and seeing if some of those moods and some of those colors worked in a more relaxed environment."