Something of a supergroup, Black Duck brings together three key figures of the Chicago music scene. Douglas McCombs (bass/guitar), Bill MacKay (guitar) and Charles Rumback (drums) draw on the breadth of their experience to create a visionary sound beyond traditional genre conventions. Their self-titled 2023 debut, released via Thrill Jockey Records, arrived relatively early in the project’s life, but felt like an album years in the making. This was not least thanks to the evident connection and fluency which existed between its performers. A tentative introduction it was not. The audience was clearly in the hands of people who knew what they were doing.
With these foundations established, Black Duck is now pushing the envelope further. After touring across Spain with acclaimed Basque musician Elena Setién, the trio felt they had discovered someone else clearly attuned to the Black Duck spirit, and have taken this forward to not only invigorate the project, but to reimagine its very boundaries. Again released with Thrill Jockey, Black Duck with Elena Setién sees Black Duck become a quartet in order to bottle the lightning of this live performance. “This record for me, is a prolongation of that tour together in Spain,” Setién explains. “We combined our sets and every night new improvisations evolved. So we took that same freshness to the studio.”
This was achieved by a fleet-footed approach to recording, the foursome only rehearsing for a matter of hours before heading to the Palisade studio with trusted collaborator Nick Broste and unleashing the spontaneous creativity which has so marked the tour. “Working with Nick Broste was easy and natural for us,” Rumback continues. “At this point we have all probably recorded multiple projects with him in different bands, so it was a shared language that let us move fast.” Setién adds, “Nick is the kind of sound engineer who makes music with the band–sound is his instrument.”
Listen to lead single ‘Land of the Many Eyes’ now:
