Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Any sound, repeated quickly, becomes a sustained tone. Any sound, slowed down, starts to beat. Music is the line between these two points, the wave that lives between the terminal ends of voice and drum. That’s where you’ll find Greg Fox. He moves through musical stages as both listener and player, a transformative rather than performative force. If you don’t know his work, start here: Fox is well-known in the lesser-known, a drummer with hundreds of credits on obscure records. His reputation is that of the elevated beast, that guy, the one who plays fast and loud and expresses himself at the extremes and in the extremes. That’s not wrong. Fox is also a slow theorist, a musician aware of those who came before him, and a teacher of drumming, with students all over the world.
He remains a student himself, open-minded, honest, and willing. He has worked with drummers like Thurman Barker (Mighty Joe Young, Marvin Gaye, Cecil Taylor), Guy Licata (Drummers Collective, Jojo Mayer, Jim Chapin), Marvin “Bugalu” Smith (James Brown, Sun Ra, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus) and Milford Graves (Milford Graves). Fox has a practice that goes beyond drumming—he is a certified professional coach who focuses on transformational life changes. He helps people find their rhythms, in behavior, mind, and spirit. All of this experience draws to a point and that’s where you can find Contact.
Contact is built largely from the work of one person alone in a room, using his body to make sense of the surfaces around him. That was the reality when it was recorded in November of 2018 at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn. For obvious reasons, it is even more that now. Created in close unison with producer Randall Dunn, Contact makes the acoustic drum set talk and sing and see.
Fox uses sensory percussion to control and manipulate software instruments and samples. You’ll hear that on Contact in the washes of keyboards and bells and synthetic tonalities, all of it following the lead of the drums. It’s a record of rhythms that isn’t a beat record. Fox’s drumming is full and considered, like an enormous stone arm pushing slowly through a forest.
Contact occupies a space of energized meditation, neither mellow nor aggressive. It rolls the way Fox rolls. All of his musical experience flows into this record. If you know his past, you’ll understand his present. Fox has played with Liturgy, Zs, Ex Eye, Guardian Alien, Ben Frost, Colin Stetson, and dozens of other people. “I’m exploring collaborations now and using different guiding principles. I’m changing how I arrive at working with who I work with,” Fox said. “I’m engineering, teaching, and coaching. I’ve been operating and running a studio for myself, and it will be a for-hire studio very soon.”
-Sasha Frere-Jones, 2020
“Good drummers aren’t uncommon. Great ones are. We still mourn Keith Moon of the Who and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin as the jolly bashers of modernity. Here comes the future, they seemed to be telling us with their sensational ka-blammo. Together, they popularized the notion that, in rock-and-roll, a drummer’s unsolemn duty is to establish a sense of time while happily smashing it to bits. Greg Fox reactivates that idea for the Information Age.”
