Slinky Vagabond | The Eternal Return
by Dana Miller
The civically brilliant socio-anthropologist Sal Restivo once expertly observed, “If you give me a genius, I’ll give you a social network,” and the appealingly Apollonian art-rock band Slinky Vagabond, helmed by longtime creative confidantes Keanan Duffty and Fabio Fabbri, has unerringly embodied that maxim via music for nearly twenty years now.
The material grip of music expands and contracts in connective spirals no human meter can yet measure, and there is something culturally osmotic about what people who generate music together come to know about themselves, the environment in which they are combining forces, and the world into which they ultimately release their audible creations.
Having a great deal of grá for grand collaborations from the start, and indeed having pushed the boat out on their band from the shores of a direct desire for the truths only close, circumstellar brushes with disparate creative energies can offer, Slinky Vagabond seems to have soldered itself together as a group with an implicit understanding that air in a conversation does not have to connote absence wherever songs are concerned. By categorically refusing to delimit where they sieved for rhythmicity between one another and gold between the notes, Slinky Vagabond has made meaningful mergings into something of a musical mudlarking license, and it is one that has allowed them the labyrinthine space to produce troves of sounds that may, at face value, have not first appeared to be part of the same cryptic crossword. Slinky Vagabond’s attitude suggests it is that very cross-pollination that conjures and conjoins them.
