"MIE presents Knock on Lifes Door from Cara & Mike Gangloff With The Great American Drone Orchestra. "Theres a particular twinkle in the great expanse of American songwriting. This has seen countless nostalgic exploitations over the years - collections of popular songs strung together under the banner of the so-called Great American Songbook that have reiterated the form of many of these songs without contemplating their depths. In terms of thoughtful, emotive synthesis, few have understood it in the way that Cara and Mike Gangloff understand it on this new album. They have taken older American songs, popular songs that weve come to understand as standards, and stretched them out into the rolling hills and vast expanses that gave birth to the nation's earliest music. American history is a history of tension. A group of aristocrats saw fit to bestow a limited degree of freedom upon the underclasses. They called this democracy, co-opting a concept that terrified them in the hopes that the implications of its meaning might placate the unwashed masses. Within that sliver of freedom, incredible heights were reached. Blues. Jazz. Mountain music. And on and on. The songs on this record are recognizable. They're classics. And yet here they play out in ways the songwriters could never have predicted. Cara and Mike Gangloff have married the colloquial with the eternal. With certain songs, like Sentimental Journey, they lift the material out of its saccharine setting and into the troubling and sublime nation from which it springs. All of Me is rendered utterly psychotic, teasing apart the songs desperate, masochistic, violent implications. The songs become essays about themselves, investigations into their own histories of terror and escape. Mood Indigo becomes a haunting dirge. Cry Me a River is a rhythmically jarring lightning rod of unease. The inventiveness of interpretation is spirit-raising. The cultural history of the country is one of cosmic entertainment in the face of excruciating injustice. Transcendence has always been necessary. For better or worse, the United States of America is a nation defined by expanse." - Matt Krefting, 2016. "The Great American Drone Orchestra is: Sharon Stacy, Charlie Andersen, Matt Peyton, Sonya Austin, Joe Dejarnette, Sally Anne Morgan, Isak Howell, Scott Prouty, Anne Hartman, Tatsuya Nakatani, Nathan Bowles, Michelle Dove, Reilly Stacy Blackwell, Abriel Stacy Blackwell and Willa Shea-Gangloff." - MIE.
