First Impressions 033: back porch delights, Brazilian experimental, geometry in motion, jazz cradles and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

I’ve only had time for reviews this week. However, following last week’s musings on AI and the current industry hand-wringing surrounding it, you might like to read Ted Chiang’s recent essay in The New Yorker on how, despite or alongside technology, art is still realised through the choices we make to convey meaning, rather than merely finding a means to an end.
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OK, let’s go:

Viewfinder – Wendy Eisenberg: “Changing isn’t healing,” Wendy Eisenberg sings on their new album, a true opus inspired by their experience with laser eye surgery. It carries the sense of someone seeing the world anew, tempered by matter-of-fact reflections on the darker side of clarity, punctuated by stark words and slithering instrumental interludes. Imagine Laura Nyro’s elastic '70s baroque soul-pop reimagined today with an avant-jazz mindset, or even something John Zorn might have recorded for ECM, and you’ll get close to Viewfinder’s expansive scope and vision. (oops) Helmed by the warmth and dazzle of Eisenberg’s guitar, the album drives from sensuous to spiky through several extended improvisations, taking its time to circle around to the idea that unseeing is believing.

Another Tide, Another Fish – Andrew Tuttle, Michael Chapman: Brisbane’s Andrew Tuttle was asked to complete an unfinished album of guitar and effects-based instrumentals from the late UK artist Michael Chapman, an artist aligned with Tuttle in his long career expanding folk essence with kaleidoscopic rush. Tuttle is ripe for the challenge, confirming his current purple patch for complex music with gentle demands. As ever, Tuttle plays with the sun on his back – open, warm, and bright with joy – whether with his banjo or synth lines and their airy, nimble dance. Chapman was a lyricist towing heavy emotions. I suspect his instrumental work was intended to be more of a turn toward back porch delights, but with no less of the deep passion pouring from his songwriting. You can hear that in the original unfinished versions alongside Tuttle’s new imaginings, suggesting perhaps that Chapman could never fully extricate himself from stormier undertows. If Tuttle was enlisted to find their source of light, it’s an inspired choice.

Jazz Plates - Ulla & Perila: I wouldn’t have channeled jazz notions from listening to this if not for the title. However, by citing Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders as inspirations for this new collaboration and hearing its wide-eyed optimism and meditative pull, it makes intuitive sense. Neither Ulla nor Perila is afraid of absorbing the surroundings of nature to achieve a soft but granular ambient release that mimics its idiosyncrasies. Much of the first half of Jazz Plates simmers the bucolic and pastoral aspects of new age music into slow, tumbling rolls of abstracted sensations, with breathy clarinet and saxophone playing melding with cooing vocal emissions and pensive piano chords to create cradled atmospheres. The second half introduces more clanking turmoil to disrupt and disorient the previous sense of harmony, as if both sides need each other to exist. The idea of peace as a vaporous swirl to place into the air through music is a lofty aim on the part of these two, but they approach it with humility and depth of feeling – it’s knowingly naïve and genuine for that.

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Chico Mello / Helinho Brandão - Chico Mello / Helinho Brandão: There are reissues, and then there are reissues on Black Truffle. Basically, label founder Oren Ambarchi can pick ’em, and this 1984 album is the latest in a long line of his excavations of works that crack open familiar gestures of popular music like melody and melodrama through dissonance and abstraction. Mello’s experimental sensibilities are keenly attuned to Brazilian popular music and its expressionistic possibilities. Alongside saxophonist Brandão, they explore its tensions, weaving minimalism, free jazz, and sound design into a theatrical interplay of movement and dissolve. Through an approach that invokes the fantastical, allowing the pair's imaginations to tick over with orchestral flourishes, saxophone wails, lilting piano, percussion, and jagging guitars, this brilliant work rises by never differentiating between the wild and sophisticated in its pursuit of beauty.

Gaslight – Atsuko Hatano: Tokyo’s Atsuko Hatano is a highly prolific experimental artist, positioning her five-string viola in duo, trio, and band contexts spanning abrasive punk, post-classical, opera, and pop, as well as recording and performing with the likes of Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke. On this solo album of electroacoustic compositions, Hatano accentuates the mournful sweep of her playing against static noises that sound like firecrackers dying out and synth notes that hang wonkily. I’m pleasantly disoriented by its sagging celebratory feel until muggy organ washes and starry, twinkling textures introduce more brooding omens for a filmic state of flux characterised by the empty vastness of outer space. Hatano is restless but assured in the narrative arc of Gaslight, in the way a good sci-fi film is ghosted with phenomena as unseen forces bristling within our headspace that we must invite and reckon with.

Three Rivulets – Kristina Warren: Three extended pieces from the Providence, Rhode Island electroacoustic synthesist, inspired by the possibility of shapes, specifically rectangles, triangles, and circles. Warren also has an audiovisual component for all three works you can see here. Rectangles steams forward on raw feedback tones that coalesce into glimmering frequencies and vibrations of rhythm that begin in parallel before creaking into union. Triangles has both a sinister and playful edge to its elemental throb, ticking on shrouding movements that variously rise and decay with wild fervour. Circles indeed feels circular in its vortex-like flow, capturing the essence of Warren’s compositional way for a cool-headed kind of turbulence. In this, Warren takes the Earth’s continual bump as geometry in motion – patterns endlessly in reinvention and never fixed.

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