When the trickster god that is Jennifer Walshe claims to have recorded an album with someone who passed away eight years ago, one would be forgiven for raising an eyebrow in suspicion. But In the Merry Month of May, by Walshe and the great experimental polymath Tony Conrad, is actually a disarmingly direct album. Walshe and Conrad performed together for many years (if probably not the 4,400 years Walshe claims) as Ma La Pert, and this album, which records Conrad’s last foray into a studio before his passing in 2016, is a straightforward set of improvisations.

‘Directness’ has not been Walshe’s modus operandi for some time. Her work is theatrical and ironic, its musicality processed through video and theory and veiled in misdirection. Conrad’s practice, too, spanned visual art and film as much as music. But they have always also been improvisers, and on this album they are in full voice. On the opening track, ‘In the Merry Month of May’, they are strident and extroverted, Walshe’s voice leaning into close harmonies with Conrad’s electrified and prepared violin and mimicking his scratch tones.

This track is also the album’s single, and has a music video by Tony Oursler (a long-time collaborator of Conrad’s and the director of his archives), in which images of Conrad and Walshe playing together and duelling with violin bows are juxtaposed against a fittingly eclectic procession of riots and police brutality, a timelapse footage of a sprouting plant, a zodiac wheel, CRT televisions getting smashed up. But make no mistake: this music video is a later complement to the music itself, which is as close to ‘pure’ music as Walshe gets: in love with timbre; in intimate conversation with her old musical friend.

Not that the album as a whole is as pure as this. Indeed, this is only half of the story of ‘In the Merry Month of May’ itself. The title alludes to the civil unrest of May 1968, and the track’s harsh dissonances are certainly politically informed. But other tracks lean more into theatre: ‘Well You Would’ is built on that bitter phrase (as in, ‘well you would say that, wouldn’t you?’) and the prosody that accompanies it, as well as an exploration of processing effects, and ‘He’s Definitely not the Type’ is a pained reflection on the casuistry victims of domestic abuse put themselves through.

‘He Only Had One Paw’ explores the timbres of blues singing, Conrad joining in on slide guitar. As with much of the album, I am unsure whether this track is a dry experiment in blues idioms, a loving and funny pastiche of them, or an earnest attempt to incorporate them into Walshe and Conrad’s own expressive vocabulary. Presumably it’s all of these, and this open-ended polysemy makes this music delightfully fizzy.

‘O My God’ is based on an anaphoric repetition of ‘O my God, O my God’, each time followed by something that sounds as if Walshe is reciting an auto-completer’s attempts to continue the phrase. This juxtaposition of found texts is a hallmark of Walshe’s work, but ‘O My God’ is a nice reminder of how much musicality she brings to this device, and how much love of the sound of speech underlies it, as is apparent in how she varies ‘O my God, O my God’ each time it comes around: she listens carefully and lovingly to all the ways we utter this ubiquitous phrase. Similarly, in ‘Wake Up’ Walshe listens carefully to stuttering as a manifestation of anxiety.

On many of the tracks, Walshe’s voice takes the foreground, with Conrad’s gleeful cacophony playing a supporting role. This is perhaps most pronounced in ‘Day of the Fair’, in which Walshe belts out a singalong tune in which every single note seems to grate in a different way. The way she confidently lands on a note that is definitely off and sustains it without any attempt to correct it is hilarious, but it’s also heartwarming in its way – a vision of the pride we could have if we didn’t spend our childhoods being told to shush.

In some tracks, however, Walshe retreats somewhat, and the collaboration is more clearly equal. ‘Dance Dance’ is a short piece in which Walshe’s voice is distorted to incomprehensibility, and Conrad’s pizzicato is shifted down two octaves; it sounds like a free-jazz drums and bass duo, and is a perfect moment of calm amidst the high energy of the majority of this album. Then, in the closing track, ‘People Need to Know’, things wind down. Perhaps the drunken revelry of the preceding ‘Day of the Fair’ has exhausted us? Walshe sounds like she is singing from a distant gramophone while strange, ethereal sounds (I think string piano and a violin detuned almost to pitchlessness are involved) send us home in a remarkably – considering how things started – mellow mood as the last of the lights are switched off. But after this feast of an album, we’re well sated.

In the Merry Month of May by Jennifer Walshe and Tony Conrad is released on the Blue Chopsticks label, an imprint of Drag City, and available on vinyl and in digital formats. Visit www.dragcity.com or Bandcamp.

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