First Impressions 034: hyperchamber music, environmental studies, folk ethers, laptop fusion and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

No other thoughts to share this week other than those below, though this week’s set contains some truly brilliant music. I hope you’ll find some time for each work. Thanks to all who have sent kind words and music!
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OK, let’s go:

lacuna and parlor - More Eaze: Across a multitude of solo works, Mari Maurice has stretched the hyperrush of modern pop like a rubber band toward her relentless experimental bent. Just when you think it’s all set to snap and break, her music holds in place with a foundational sense of wonder and sublime, dexterous craft. On lacuna and parlor, chamber music and minimalism sit squarely in her field of dreams, a space where Americana is lifted out of its rustic notions of authenticity into high-end art. It’s a freewheeling act that might give Van Dyke Parks a knowing grin. That pop side is largely doled into the monumental blanking intervals, where bedroom indie melodies and metronomic rhythms glaze into an uncanny synthesis of ambience and noise with symphonic reach. Any More Eaze work is no less than fascinating; as her ambitions grow grander, her playfulness refuses to fall by the wayside.

Atlas of Green – Dialect: Inspired by sci-fi works that tell tales of new worlds shaped by fragments of folklore in the aftermath of a ruined Earth, the music on British composer Andrew PM Hunt’s third album as Dialect seems to sprout from the ground and hang in distorted ether. Softly spun acoustic guitar, tinkling piano, tingling strings, and synth signals that reverberate like the mystery of an endless engaged signal, Atlas of Green strains sweeter, pastoral moments from British music’s modes of hauntology. Moreover, there’s a kinship with Virginia Astley’s 1983 classic From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, where nature’s reverie frames a quiet serenade towards new possibilities, removed from the cyclical stasis of industrialised existence.

For Peace And Liberty, In Paris dec 1972 - Black Artist Group: The Black Artists Group formed in St. Louis, Missouri, initially to further the work of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in magnifying Afro-centric creativity and cultural legacy, with a more multidisciplinary focus that featured dancers, actors, and poets. One of its founders, Oliver Lake, moved to Paris in 1972 with a core group of musicians: Joseph Bowie, Baikida Carroll, and Bobo Shaw, to work in diametric opposition to a rapidly homogenising U.S. industry that was sapping artists of their creativity and heritage. This live recording from that time displays the raw power and swinging abandon of the players’ communion, forged in both the history and feeling of jazz timbre and the explosion of instinct and purpose that defined the European avant-garde they nestled in. Free jazz in itself was not the ultimate expression for BAG, atomising it in real time into abstract points, allowing space for each player to explore and interact equally. Still, the inventive might in their high-wire swirls of melody and groove makes this a body blast as much as a brain bender.

Deep Valley - Seaworthy and Matt Rösner: It was only weeks ago that Longform Editions released the precursor to this album, Bundanon, named for the artists’ retreat where it was recorded, along with this album. Bundanon is a nature and wildlife sanctuary on the New South Wales south coast. In Deep Valley, the tenuous air of human presence in such environments is captured in the uncanny fluidity drawn from fragmentary chords of guitar and piano, carefully set into its ambient trace of field recordings. Deep Valley is not an entirely calm space, as through its hypnotic pull is a stream of carefully captured sonic detail from the landscape, pricking at any chance of a lulled consciousness with a bustle in its hedgerow.

Inside For Now - Zoltan Fecso: Naarm (Melbourne) composer Zoltan Fecso is here, in some ways, at his least considered, coming from an hour at the piano at a nature retreat with the windows open. These improvisations are small delights, quietly merry in their way with the melodic bounce of bop-era jazz perfected by the likes of Ahmad Jamal. Fecso’s work is more typically ponderous and charged – I have never heard him so straight-up tuneful – though he can’t resist lacing a more ethereal flourish and drift into his playing as the album draws to a close, notes hanging in the air.

Sky Time – YAI: New Yorkers John Thayer and David Lackner come together in the name of exquisitely rendered laptop melange, led by layered waves of woodwinds, swooping brass and organ, shadowed by a plumage of drifting tones and percussive patterning. It begins mapping its digital coordinates as a fantasy collaboration between Jon Hassell and Don Cherry, moving into a freeform reimagining of exotica glistening with an 80s sheen before letting that particular kind of slick slide into synth-jazz fusion mode. If you like the playful seriousness of the recent Total Blue album with its cheese-copping cool, turn your collar up for YAI.

Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.