Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her third solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr — plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt’s quartet — the guitarist’s name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar’s possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down.
This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza’s thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock’n’roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill. Conceptually, The Circular Train is presented as a psychogeographical train ride through certain of Mendoza’s musical homelands. The songs draw on ancestral and recent familial memories, notably of her parents’ roots in mining towns — in her father’s home country of Bolivia and mother’s hometown of Butte, Montana, each country with its own history of colonialism, racism, forced labor, the eradication of culture and the subsequent excavation of it.
These adventurous songs were composed in cars and planes, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in Los Angeles and upstate New York — which is to say in motion. “Ride to Cerro Rico,” named for the mountain and silver mine at the center of Potosi, Bolivia, was inspired by Mendoza’s great grandmother’s life there in a Quechua mining family. “Dust From the Mines” drew from that history as well as Mendoza’s familial lineage of miners in Montana, building up to stunning swaths of shredded iridescence. “Pink River Dolphins” was inspired by a visit to the Amazon rainforest, swimming with dolphins alongside her father — the pink bufeos that inhabit both Bolivia and Columbia — and the song is dedicated to the memory of Mendoza’s late friend, the Colombian-American trumpeter jaimie branch. They shared a fascination with those intelligent and agile creatures who often communicate by echolocation. “Make a sound, it comes back around,” Mendoza sings, and later, “Echo, echo/The answer in a sound,” evoking what branch knew well: through music we navigate life.
The Circular Train contains one cover, “Irene, Goodnight,” composed by Gussie Lord Davis and popularized by Leadbelly; Mendoza has been performing it for over 20 years. Almost as deeply embedded in her repertoire is the penultimate track, “The Shadow Song.” “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you good,” Mendoza sings on this song that she’s been reworking for over a decade, an emblem of devotion. “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you right,” she repeats, becoming a blues mantra. What is a shadow self if not one’s secret world, which, once laid bare, awaits an echo, a return? — JENN PELLY
----- THE CIRCULAR TRAIN album notes by Ava Mendoza:
I had the honor of spending several years as the nightly entertainer onboard The Circular Train. Over this time I wrote, arranged and honed these songs through routine concerts. After some nudging from Bill Orcutt, I decided the music was worth documenting, and this record is the result. The notes below are partly on the songs and songwriting, but just as much on the fantastic surroundings I passed regularly on the railway, and by which the music was inspired.
CYPRESS CROSSING (outside Tutwiler, MS)
The train’s course begins at night in humid lowlands, traveling south across a floodplain. The flat stillness of the land stretches out to the horizon’s straight seam, as far as the eye can see in any direction. The nothing-around-ness. Every few miles, a row of bald cypresses runs a hundred or two hundred feet, perpendicular to the train tracks. You see the indents and ripples the water creates on the earth when it floods each year. The train cuts through the muggy air, heavy as an animal’s slow, silent held breath. The land is land but it’s also water. More often than not, the moon is completely full and deep yellow, high overhead, and more often than not a big storm is coming the following day
Cypress can live on land or in water, in fresh or brackish water. Outside the first station, a cypress row runs parallel to the tracks and crosses a perpendicular one. Call it a chakana or call it kalfu. These crossings are where choices, deals, and histories are made and where the magic happens.
PINK RIVER DOLPHINS (north of Rurrenabaque, Bolivia)
The train rocks along across the wetland into more densely overgrown land, which gradually becomes a jungle. Winding languidly though palms, banana trees, bamboo groves, the tracks meet a large, slow moving river. Here the route veers sharply right, westward, and rides alongside the water. Traveling almost as slowly as the river now, from the windows you see all kinds of wildlife along the banks. Crocodiles and caiman lizards, families of capybaras, howler and capuchin monkeys, macaws and cockatoos. In the water are catfish, bass, and schools of piranhas. And snakes—water cobras and they say further south anacondas. But the master hunters of the river here are the bufeos, the dolphins—not just any dolphins, but pink ones.
These pink dolphins traveled inland from the Pacific Ocean who knows how many million years ago, or why. Smart and agile swimmers, they outwile the crocodiles and the biggest snakes and fish. The waters here are murky, and their keen, rapidfire echolocation often helps them more than their eyesight. The river guides know which bends of the river are dolphin territory—the crocodiles don’t come around here, and it’s safe to swim. When any new creature comes into the bufeo area, they swim around it as a group, examining it carefully and sometimes touching it with their long noses to suss it out.
The 2023 Mendoza ★ Hoff ★ Revels record, Echolocation, contains this text, written by my co-leader Dev Hoff: “Music, among other things, can be experienced as a measure of time and space. Music is also a measure of human relations, with each other and with the world we inhabit. Certain animals–including bats, shrews, dolphins, and whales–use sound to find their way through space and time by decoding sonic refractions. This seems like a fitting metaphor for how music helps humans collectively decode our own experiences of our world and our lives, through the alchemy of transfigured sound.”
The trumpet player Jaimie Branch, who left us in August 2022, was a dear musical companion and friend. The last album by her band Anteloper, a duo project with drummer Jason Nazary, was called Pink Dolphins. Jaimie was half Colombian, I’m half Bolivian. Pink dolphins live in both countries, and she and I shared a fascination with these amazing creatures. This song is dedicated to Jaimie. You make a sound and it echoes back around—echolocation as a fact of life. And she lives it—no one sounded like Jaimie and no one listened like Jaimie.
My dad and I wade into the shallows, shy of the bufeos but wanting to be best friends too. They swim all around, and deftly in between us. Gray and pink mottled fins and bodies break the water’s surface, the skin textured and pebbled, often showing heavy scarring. “Uy!” My dad jumps as a dolphin gently noses him in the chest, then retreats and continues playing with the group. A tree branch has fallen in the river nearby. The bufeos leave us, surround the branch, and nudge it downstream 100 feet or so while they continue diving and circling each other. “They keep their part of the river clean,” says our guide. Once the branch is downstream out of sight, they swim back to us and the games continue.
RIDE TO CERRO RICO (north of Cerro Rico, Bolivia,)
The train passes out of the jungle and chugs steadily up a steep mountain. The lush land dries out and the tropical vegetation gives way to juniper and firs, sumac and cacti. The smell of juniper, and even more than that of sage. The ground turns to shale as the ascent continues. Through the windows you can see dust blowing in a strong wind, the vegetation thinning out to almost nothing. Cerro Rico is the world’s largest silver deposit. For centuries slaves worked it, lived and died on its slopes. Today people do the same, though they’re not called slaves. My great-grandmother Matilde came from a family of Quechua miners that lived for hundreds of years in and around Chayanta, Potosi. Her father died in the mines, and as the oldest child she looked after her younger siblings with her mother. She worked as a lavadora, washing the mineral earth outside the mine’s entrance to separate the metal waste.
She raised her siblings, then her children, and then her grandchildren; my dad loved her like a parent and spoke of her as the kindest person he knew. Tall compared to other Quechua women, thin, with silver hair tied back, silver earrings from her hometown. He always says when his time comes to leave this world, he’ll look for Matilde to come from the next one and guide him into it. At the top of the mountain the smell of dust, or more than that the feel of dust in your nostrils and lungs, replaces the smell or feel of anything living.
DUST FROM THE MINES (Chayanta, Potosi and Butte, MT)
The air is full of such fine silt here that even in the train car with the windows closed, you can hardly see your hand in front of you. This is where the entrance to the mine is. The ruler of the mines is El Tio. In fact, both sides of my family come from here. One side mines copper, one silver, one uses open pit, one goes underground, one uses gallus frames and one doesn’t. Butte, Montana, USA. Chayanta, Potosi, Bolivia. Belowground, there are altars to El Tio all though the mines– statues where miners offer singani, beer, cigarettes, coca leaves. Aboveground, the gallus frames crane back their heads to the sky.
El Tio looks after miners if they offer him enough gifts. He keeps the dust from clogging their lungs, protects and guides them safely through the twisting tunnels, prevents rockslides and accidents, safeguards their family members, and leads them to the silver veins. Life in the mines is a gamble—if he’s fed right, El Tio can be on their side, and if he’s not, their time is short. Before El Tio, there were Tiw (Uru), Muki (Quechua) and Anchancha (Aymara). These ruled the underworld, anything inside the earth. Canyons, springs, rivers, lakes, and of course mines and mining towns.
THE SHADOW SONG
The train starts its descent from the mountains, heading north, the sun streaming in the western windows. It’s light casts the train’s shadow long across the eastern landscape. Trees and flowers reappear. The air becomes more humid.
There’s no way to control or predict your shadow, but you can at least be kind to it and cross your fingers.
IRENE, GOODNIGHT (Shreveport, LA)
The only cover song on the record, this is one I have been performing steadily for twenty years now. Irene was written by Gussie Lord Davis. Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1863, he was denied entrance to music school in Cincinnati due to his skin color. He instead found a job as a janitor at the school, and took music lessons secretly with several teachers. He went on to become the first Black composer to have major success on Tin Pan Alley.
Davis published the song Irene, Goodnight in 1886. Many of his other songs went on to become bluegrass classics, recorded by the Monroe Brothers, Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley etc.
Irene was first made famous by the the great Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Born in Mooringsport, LA, Lead Belly moved to Shreveport, LA and later on to Texas. He spent many years in and out of jail and prison, being convicted among other things of of a murder and later an attempted murder. One prison stint was at the notorious Angola State Prison in Louisiana, where he came to the attention of John and Alan Lomax, at the time recording prison songs.
Up through the hills, out the right/eastern windows you can see a large gray building on a faraway summit. As we approach, the surrounding walls become visible, barbed wire lining their tops and towers at the corners. A prison. We pass by, the train’s shadow shivering in the last light. The sun slips under the horizon to our left.
Soon after, we come to a lake and cross a long bridge over it. Crossing the lake, we are surrounded on all sides by bald cypress trees growing straight out of the water.
Once across the bridge with the lake behind us, we’re out of the hills and back in flat wetlands again. The vegetation is denser here than where we started the journey, and soon the train is completely surrounded by lush growth.
-Ava Mendoza
credits
releases November 15, 2024
Thanks to: gabby fluke-mogul, Bill, Eli, Jim, Jason Rostkowski, Leyya Tawil, William Parker, Gerald Cleaver, Malcolm Mooney, Hamid Drake, Marino Pliakas, Michael Wertmuller, Quasi, Sumac, Ludmilla Faccenda, Fay Victor, and the Shifting Foundation
1. Cypress Crossing
2. Pink River Dolphins 04:45
3. Ride to Cerro Rico
4. Dust from the Mines 06:31
5. The Shadow Song
6. Irene, Goodnight
This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza’s thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock’n’roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill. Conceptually, The Circular Train is presented as a psychogeographical train ride through certain of Mendoza’s musical homelands. The songs draw on ancestral and recent familial memories, notably of her parents’ roots in mining towns — in her father’s home country of Bolivia and mother’s hometown of Butte, Montana, each country with its own history of colonialism, racism, forced labor, the eradication of culture and the subsequent excavation of it.
These adventurous songs were composed in cars and planes, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in Los Angeles and upstate New York — which is to say in motion. “Ride to Cerro Rico,” named for the mountain and silver mine at the center of Potosi, Bolivia, was inspired by Mendoza’s great grandmother’s life there in a Quechua mining family. “Dust From the Mines” drew from that history as well as Mendoza’s familial lineage of miners in Montana, building up to stunning swaths of shredded iridescence. “Pink River Dolphins” was inspired by a visit to the Amazon rainforest, swimming with dolphins alongside her father — the pink bufeos that inhabit both Bolivia and Columbia — and the song is dedicated to the memory of Mendoza’s late friend, the Colombian-American trumpeter jaimie branch. They shared a fascination with those intelligent and agile creatures who often communicate by echolocation. “Make a sound, it comes back around,” Mendoza sings, and later, “Echo, echo/The answer in a sound,” evoking what branch knew well: through music we navigate life.
The Circular Train contains one cover, “Irene, Goodnight,” composed by Gussie Lord Davis and popularized by Leadbelly; Mendoza has been performing it for over 20 years. Almost as deeply embedded in her repertoire is the penultimate track, “The Shadow Song.” “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you good,” Mendoza sings on this song that she’s been reworking for over a decade, an emblem of devotion. “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you right,” she repeats, becoming a blues mantra. What is a shadow self if not one’s secret world, which, once laid bare, awaits an echo, a return? — JENN PELLY
----- THE CIRCULAR TRAIN album notes by Ava Mendoza:
I had the honor of spending several years as the nightly entertainer onboard The Circular Train. Over this time I wrote, arranged and honed these songs through routine concerts. After some nudging from Bill Orcutt, I decided the music was worth documenting, and this record is the result. The notes below are partly on the songs and songwriting, but just as much on the fantastic surroundings I passed regularly on the railway, and by which the music was inspired.
CYPRESS CROSSING (outside Tutwiler, MS)
The train’s course begins at night in humid lowlands, traveling south across a floodplain. The flat stillness of the land stretches out to the horizon’s straight seam, as far as the eye can see in any direction. The nothing-around-ness. Every few miles, a row of bald cypresses runs a hundred or two hundred feet, perpendicular to the train tracks. You see the indents and ripples the water creates on the earth when it floods each year. The train cuts through the muggy air, heavy as an animal’s slow, silent held breath. The land is land but it’s also water. More often than not, the moon is completely full and deep yellow, high overhead, and more often than not a big storm is coming the following day
Cypress can live on land or in water, in fresh or brackish water. Outside the first station, a cypress row runs parallel to the tracks and crosses a perpendicular one. Call it a chakana or call it kalfu. These crossings are where choices, deals, and histories are made and where the magic happens.
PINK RIVER DOLPHINS (north of Rurrenabaque, Bolivia)
The train rocks along across the wetland into more densely overgrown land, which gradually becomes a jungle. Winding languidly though palms, banana trees, bamboo groves, the tracks meet a large, slow moving river. Here the route veers sharply right, westward, and rides alongside the water. Traveling almost as slowly as the river now, from the windows you see all kinds of wildlife along the banks. Crocodiles and caiman lizards, families of capybaras, howler and capuchin monkeys, macaws and cockatoos. In the water are catfish, bass, and schools of piranhas. And snakes—water cobras and they say further south anacondas. But the master hunters of the river here are the bufeos, the dolphins—not just any dolphins, but pink ones.
These pink dolphins traveled inland from the Pacific Ocean who knows how many million years ago, or why. Smart and agile swimmers, they outwile the crocodiles and the biggest snakes and fish. The waters here are murky, and their keen, rapidfire echolocation often helps them more than their eyesight. The river guides know which bends of the river are dolphin territory—the crocodiles don’t come around here, and it’s safe to swim. When any new creature comes into the bufeo area, they swim around it as a group, examining it carefully and sometimes touching it with their long noses to suss it out.
The 2023 Mendoza ★ Hoff ★ Revels record, Echolocation, contains this text, written by my co-leader Dev Hoff: “Music, among other things, can be experienced as a measure of time and space. Music is also a measure of human relations, with each other and with the world we inhabit. Certain animals–including bats, shrews, dolphins, and whales–use sound to find their way through space and time by decoding sonic refractions. This seems like a fitting metaphor for how music helps humans collectively decode our own experiences of our world and our lives, through the alchemy of transfigured sound.”
The trumpet player Jaimie Branch, who left us in August 2022, was a dear musical companion and friend. The last album by her band Anteloper, a duo project with drummer Jason Nazary, was called Pink Dolphins. Jaimie was half Colombian, I’m half Bolivian. Pink dolphins live in both countries, and she and I shared a fascination with these amazing creatures. This song is dedicated to Jaimie. You make a sound and it echoes back around—echolocation as a fact of life. And she lives it—no one sounded like Jaimie and no one listened like Jaimie.
My dad and I wade into the shallows, shy of the bufeos but wanting to be best friends too. They swim all around, and deftly in between us. Gray and pink mottled fins and bodies break the water’s surface, the skin textured and pebbled, often showing heavy scarring. “Uy!” My dad jumps as a dolphin gently noses him in the chest, then retreats and continues playing with the group. A tree branch has fallen in the river nearby. The bufeos leave us, surround the branch, and nudge it downstream 100 feet or so while they continue diving and circling each other. “They keep their part of the river clean,” says our guide. Once the branch is downstream out of sight, they swim back to us and the games continue.
RIDE TO CERRO RICO (north of Cerro Rico, Bolivia,)
The train passes out of the jungle and chugs steadily up a steep mountain. The lush land dries out and the tropical vegetation gives way to juniper and firs, sumac and cacti. The smell of juniper, and even more than that of sage. The ground turns to shale as the ascent continues. Through the windows you can see dust blowing in a strong wind, the vegetation thinning out to almost nothing. Cerro Rico is the world’s largest silver deposit. For centuries slaves worked it, lived and died on its slopes. Today people do the same, though they’re not called slaves. My great-grandmother Matilde came from a family of Quechua miners that lived for hundreds of years in and around Chayanta, Potosi. Her father died in the mines, and as the oldest child she looked after her younger siblings with her mother. She worked as a lavadora, washing the mineral earth outside the mine’s entrance to separate the metal waste.
She raised her siblings, then her children, and then her grandchildren; my dad loved her like a parent and spoke of her as the kindest person he knew. Tall compared to other Quechua women, thin, with silver hair tied back, silver earrings from her hometown. He always says when his time comes to leave this world, he’ll look for Matilde to come from the next one and guide him into it. At the top of the mountain the smell of dust, or more than that the feel of dust in your nostrils and lungs, replaces the smell or feel of anything living.
DUST FROM THE MINES (Chayanta, Potosi and Butte, MT)
The air is full of such fine silt here that even in the train car with the windows closed, you can hardly see your hand in front of you. This is where the entrance to the mine is. The ruler of the mines is El Tio. In fact, both sides of my family come from here. One side mines copper, one silver, one uses open pit, one goes underground, one uses gallus frames and one doesn’t. Butte, Montana, USA. Chayanta, Potosi, Bolivia. Belowground, there are altars to El Tio all though the mines– statues where miners offer singani, beer, cigarettes, coca leaves. Aboveground, the gallus frames crane back their heads to the sky.
El Tio looks after miners if they offer him enough gifts. He keeps the dust from clogging their lungs, protects and guides them safely through the twisting tunnels, prevents rockslides and accidents, safeguards their family members, and leads them to the silver veins. Life in the mines is a gamble—if he’s fed right, El Tio can be on their side, and if he’s not, their time is short. Before El Tio, there were Tiw (Uru), Muki (Quechua) and Anchancha (Aymara). These ruled the underworld, anything inside the earth. Canyons, springs, rivers, lakes, and of course mines and mining towns.
THE SHADOW SONG
The train starts its descent from the mountains, heading north, the sun streaming in the western windows. It’s light casts the train’s shadow long across the eastern landscape. Trees and flowers reappear. The air becomes more humid.
There’s no way to control or predict your shadow, but you can at least be kind to it and cross your fingers.
IRENE, GOODNIGHT (Shreveport, LA)
The only cover song on the record, this is one I have been performing steadily for twenty years now. Irene was written by Gussie Lord Davis. Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1863, he was denied entrance to music school in Cincinnati due to his skin color. He instead found a job as a janitor at the school, and took music lessons secretly with several teachers. He went on to become the first Black composer to have major success on Tin Pan Alley.
Davis published the song Irene, Goodnight in 1886. Many of his other songs went on to become bluegrass classics, recorded by the Monroe Brothers, Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley etc.
Irene was first made famous by the the great Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Born in Mooringsport, LA, Lead Belly moved to Shreveport, LA and later on to Texas. He spent many years in and out of jail and prison, being convicted among other things of of a murder and later an attempted murder. One prison stint was at the notorious Angola State Prison in Louisiana, where he came to the attention of John and Alan Lomax, at the time recording prison songs.
Up through the hills, out the right/eastern windows you can see a large gray building on a faraway summit. As we approach, the surrounding walls become visible, barbed wire lining their tops and towers at the corners. A prison. We pass by, the train’s shadow shivering in the last light. The sun slips under the horizon to our left.
Soon after, we come to a lake and cross a long bridge over it. Crossing the lake, we are surrounded on all sides by bald cypress trees growing straight out of the water.
Once across the bridge with the lake behind us, we’re out of the hills and back in flat wetlands again. The vegetation is denser here than where we started the journey, and soon the train is completely surrounded by lush growth.
-Ava Mendoza
credits
releases November 15, 2024
Thanks to: gabby fluke-mogul, Bill, Eli, Jim, Jason Rostkowski, Leyya Tawil, William Parker, Gerald Cleaver, Malcolm Mooney, Hamid Drake, Marino Pliakas, Michael Wertmuller, Quasi, Sumac, Ludmilla Faccenda, Fay Victor, and the Shifting Foundation
1. Cypress Crossing
2. Pink River Dolphins 04:45
3. Ride to Cerro Rico
4. Dust from the Mines 06:31
5. The Shadow Song
6. Irene, Goodnight
The Circular Train by Ava Mendoza
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