Joey Burns has been biding his time. To see his group, Calexico, delivering their enthralling fusion of twangy guitars and widescreen soundtrack atmospherics live, often accompanied by a Mariachi band in traditional costume, one wouldn’t assume that such an explosive performance was the result of patience. But for over a decade, the rhythm section of Burns on bass and the drummer John Convertino have appeared on most of the finest recordings to emerge from the American South West. The sell-out show by their own project, Calexico, at the Barbican last November saw them reaching an audience largely ignorant of their history, and entirely their own. “I consciously wanted to hold back,” says Burns of the years before he stepped up to the microphone. “I’d always sung and written songs back in California before I came to Tucson, but I concentrated on being a bass player for other people. But about 1989/90 I made a conscious decision to focus on learning and listening.”

Burns and Convertino learned from the best, serving with Tucson’s improvisationally skewed country rock band Giant Sand since the late 80’s, with the instrumental combo Friends of Dean Martinez in the mid 90’s, and being the rhythm section of choice for a host of left field talents. But Burns holds a special place for the steel guitarist Rainer Ptaçek, a Tucson mainstay who died in 1997. “Rainer was the person I learned most from,” he explains. “His music was always exciting and transporting and you always learned something new from him. He inspired a lot of the music of the Friends of Dean Martinez, by pushing the envelope, mixing blues with jazz and always improvising.”

After a subdued debut, Burns and Convertino’s second Calexico album, 1998’s The Black Light, hitched Alternative Country moves to a Mariachi horn section and evoked scenes of Spaghetti western soundtrack grandeur. As émigrés to the Southwest, Burns and Convertino, who have supplied music for the local academic Laurence Clarke Powell’s spoken word cd’s of the region’s history, were free to seize upon the desert’s most affecting sounds and images with fresh eyes. “It was easy to identify with the place, and with the music you associate with it – Link Wray, Lee Hazelwood, Ennio Moricone,” says Burns, “But as we were not from Arizona, and as we’d arrived in our late 20’s and early 30’s we were free to dig deeper into local traditions than people who’d been there all their lives.” With the Friends of Dean Martinez, those same source materials seemed focussed through a lens of irony, but Burns and Convertino’s approximation of a Southwestern sound seemed utterly sincere. And on a practical level, Arizona time was cheap. “Tucson is a small town, small enough for there to be no pressure to hang out and take an hour out to experiment in the studio. It’s not like New York or LA where the clock is ticking and each second costs.”

Calexico’s new album, Feast of Wire, sees them at something of a crossroads. The trademark mix of scholarly experimentation offset by hot-blooded infusions of Mariachi sounds has been sacrificed for a more introspective vision. Attack El Robot! Attack! Fades out in a jazzy Gil Evans style horn arrangement; Dub Latina fuses Latin American shapes with studio tinkering; and Black Heart uses the kind of massed descending strings usually deployed by Holy Minimalist composers. Burns reminisces fondly of a show in Barcelona last December, where his fourteen piece band turned a concert performance into a party. “At the end we carried on playing acoustic at the back of the hall and people partied all night. We were able to respond to the mood on the most basic level of being humans playing acoustic instruments to people that wanted to hear them.” But how the virtual fiestas that have defined the Calexico live experience will survive their growing musical development remains to be seen. Burns and Convertino are musicians in flux, probing more unusual areas, but proud of their legacy. “The ‘Desert Rock’ label is like a doorway, and people can identify with that and then go beyond it into all the other kinds of music we’re now experimenting with.”, Burns concedes. “I think we’re all dj’s with our own vision of a radio station in our head and what the mix of sounds can be.”

Calexico play Wheelans, Dublin 8th, 9th Feb, and the London Shepherd’s Bush Empire on the 11th.
Feast of Wire is out tomorrow on City Slang. www.casadecalexico.com

Calexico Incognito.
Ten Calexico Supporting Roles

OP8 – Slush – 1997. Calexico, Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb and the violinist Lisa Germano. The duo find their own voice.
Rainer – The Farm – 1997. Three tracks with the late steel guitar guru.
Giant Sand – Backyard Barbecue – 1996. John and Joey back Howe Gelb in extended jazzy jams.
Lawrence Clark Powell – Southwest, An Essay On The Land – 1997.
Neko Case – Blacklisted – 2002. The hidden engine of last year’s alternative country classic.
Friends of Dean Martinez – The Shadow Of Your Smile – 1995. Twangy lounge band’s debut.
Richard Buckner – Devotion and Doubt – 1997. Adding light and shade to songwriterly introspection.
Bill Janowitz – Lonesome Billy – 1996. Turning the former Buffalo Tom indie-rocker into a country troubadour.
Barabara Manning – 1212 – 1997. Suitably erratic accompaniment for the psychedelic auteur.
ABBC – Tête a Tête – 2001. Collaboration with France’s Amor Belhom duo.