07 Holiday

04 Promise Of Love

Misery Maker

Peace By The Sea

You And Me

03 Houdini Escape INSTR

02 Don't Get Hung Up INSTR

08 Going Back INSTR

The Disappearing Act, the evanescent “not-actually-a-band,” the occasionally reappearing recording project, has finally phoenixed once again, for the first time since their last album, Born to Say Goodbye landed nine years ago. The just-released An Illusion, the project’s third offering, is cause for celebration on several levels, not the least of which is that the long-established Disappearing duo of Dallas’s Salim Nourallah and El Paso’s Bob Blumenfeld is now augmented by another legendary Dallasite musician, multi-instrumentalist John Dufilho, he of so many musical incarnations that the mind reels: Deathray Davies, Clifffs, I Love Math, John Buffalo, Motorcade, the currently slumbering The Apples in Stereo, and more—that’s just the short list. The Disappearing Act’s An Illusion is a 12-song testament to the unique creative partnership of Blumenfeld, Nourallah and Dufilho, a jigsaw puzzling of songwriting and production that somehow gestalts into a sum greater than its parts. Like magic. 

Although the intertwining musical lives of Nourallah and Blumenfeld date all the way back to elementary school in El Paso, “new kid” John Dufilho has a considerable history with the two as well. He and Nourallah shared stages with their respective bands in the early 90s when Dufilho was still based in San Antonio, but they cemented their friendship and working relationship after John moved to Dallas a few years later. “John and I now have a long history of playing on each other's records and doing things,” Nourallah says. “I produced Deathray Davies and I Love Math, and then he's been the longest standing member of my solo band, playing drums for many years. Now we work out of my studio together—he’s doing most of the engineering here at Pleasantry Lane…” 

With their first two albums, when The Disappearing Act was a duo, Blumenfeld and Nourallah had a singular way of cowriting, with the former playing rough demos of his guitar-based instrumental snippets for the latter, who responded, often in real-time, with melodic and lyric contributions. Now with Dufilho on board, three heads are better than two, and the project is now a full-on Cerberus of collaborative songwriting. “It was Dufilho who really saved The Disappearing Act,” Nourallah says. “Bob’s always generating musical ideas, and he and Dufilho started collaborating, with John fleshing out those ideas and making instrumentals. When I finally heard some of them, I immediately heard song songs, vocals and lyrics. John and Bob had already made these worlds, because they’d become fully formed instrumentals, which I started writing the vocal melodies and words to. For this record it was actually incredibly easy for me to just write stuff, because the tracks were so good, so interesting—it was so much fun.”

Dufilho’s contributions to the project are deep, culling and curating the seeds of Blumenfeld’s raw material, shaping the forms of the songs, and playing most of the instruments. It’s just the kind of challenge he’s made for. “My friend Bob had a whole lot of random pieces, mostly rhythm guitar recorded to a click track,” he explains, “and he was curious to see what I would do with them. He said, ‘play everything else—drums, guitars, keys, whatever you can dream up, whatever it sounds like to you.’ Bob’s got an insatiable appetite for this. He didn’t send me like five tracks—he sent me more like 50. He trusted me 100%. And there was no real end game, just music for the sake of music, which I absolutely love.” For Dufilho, Nourallah’s contributions of lyrics, vocal melodies and singing really iced the cake as the tracks coalesced into viable song entities. “I was totally thrilled once Salim decided he wanted to take a crack at putting lyrics on, because he's brilliant at that,” he continues, “and I knew I knew they'd be home runs. And they were.” 

Do too many cooks spoil the broth? Do too many egos and personalities working on a project dilute and confuse its cohesion, its direction? With The Disappearing Act, nothing could be further from the truth. An Illusion is a celebration of creativity, collaboration, and a three-ring brain trust of mutual admiration and respect. The Disappearing Act strikes again—now hold your breath…