Record Roundup: Autumn Flood, Pt. 1

As the leaves began to turn and rain down, a veritable flood of albums of all genres were released, from newcomers and veterans alike. This deluge held music of such quality that even if all music of the previous nine months mysteriously disappeared, we could call it a damned fine year. Thank goodness that didn't happen, but I can say that my calculations for those year-end lists have been upended in the last few weeks. A few of the reasons why can be found below and in a subsequent post or posts.

Follow along in this playlist or below.

John Luther Adams - Sila: The Breath Of The World Though composed for very different forces (woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings, and voices vs. symphony orchestra), as an experience Sila takes its place alongside Become Ocean and Become Desert: a seemingly vast expanse of music that unfolds more like landscape than anything else. Behind the scenes, there are other differences, with each player given the chance to be "a soloist, who plays or sings a unique part at her or his own pace," creating a bespoke version of the work each time it's performed. Here, the players are the JACK Quartet, the Crossing Choir, and musicians from the University of Michigan, all artists of such surpassing excellence that every minute lands with the inevitability of the tides. Given the flexibility granted to the performers, it may be surprising how completely unified the sound is, with instruments and voices blending together in a sublime wash of sound that invites to you to pause, to breathe, the find your own rhythm among theirs. Sila takes its name from the Inuit spirit that animates all things and, even though it preserves a particular performance forever, this remarkable recording feels marvelously alive.

Anthony Cheung - Music For Film, Sculpture, And Captions Listening to this spine-tingling collection of three pieces puts you in dialog with a lively mind as it responds to creativity encountered in sculpture, film, and, yes, captions. Cheung's absolute brilliance as an orchestrator and sonic synthesist are at the fore throughout, perhaps most impressively in The Natural Word (2019), composed for and performed by Ensemble dal Niente. Inspired by a selection of closed-captions describing sounds other than dialog, this gives Cheung the opportunity to blend together, in a witty and captivating 15 minutes, such cues as "orchestra playing tender melody" and "rain pattering." The assured architecture of the piece - another specialty of Cheung's - keeps it from being just a sequential series of sounds. That structural confidence is also well-represented in A Line Can Go Anywhere (2019), a piano concerto that pays homage to the spare, playful beauty of Ruth Asawa's sculpture. Pianist Ueli Wiget and Ensemble Modern give a dazzling, definitive performance of a work which could find a place in any orchestra's repertoire. 

Null And Void (2019), given a swaggering, pin-sharp performance by Ensemble Musikfabrik is not a film score but a "musical analogue" for Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson's silent short, Stump The Guesser. Not having seen it, I can only say that if the film is as full of charm, elegance, and emotional variety as the music Cheung created, it must be a masterpiece. Cheung's music for smaller forces is well represented on All Roads, released earlier this year. Most notable is the title piece, for string quartet and piano, which absorbs harmonic language from Billy Strayhorn's Lotus Blossom with graceful results. All in all, a banner year for Cheung fans, a constituency which should be growing rapidly!

Julian Brink - Utility Music Like Brink, I am a fan of Jonny Greenwood's film scores. Unlike Brink, I did not move halfway around the world (from South Africa) to get a master's degree in film composition from Berklee. A move to California had him putting that degree to use and scoring several indie films, including Amir Motlagh's Three Worlds (2018). But what we have here is repurposed music from one that got away, 11 short pieces that show not only an individual approach to scoring (Eventually Lapse, for example, combines a string quartet with trumpet, harp, and guitar), but a very organic sense of building harmonies and melodies into emotion-evoking snapshots. The sense of unity among the players is a further tribute to his skills as the players recorded in five different cities and were blended together later. Brink's music is sure to enhance your life, however you make use of it.

Andrew McIntosh - Little Jimmy I admit to being slightly distracted by the title of the main piece (2020) here, which is named after a campground in a National Forest in California. In no way does it prepare you for the thoughtful, suspended sounds to come, with the piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, dropping jewel-toned sounds and repeating phrases into a space colored by field recordings from the campground. Knowing the campground was forever changed by the raging Bobcat Fire also lends emotional resonance, but the music is very evocative either way. Two other pieces, I Have A Lot To Learn (2019), a gently spiky piano piece, and Learning (2021), a meditation for solo percussion, fill out what makes for an excellent introduction to McIntosh's work.

Greg Stuart - Subtractions As a collaborator with some of the most distinctive composers of our age, such Sarah Hennies and Michael Pisaro-Liu, both of whom have works premiered on this album, Stuart has more than staked a claim for himself on the landscape of avant garde percussion. Throw in work with Clipping, the radical hip hop group, and the picture broadens to a musician of uncommon depth. No surprise that he tosses off the nervous assemblage of Hennies' Border Loss (2021) as if he thought of it on the spot. His lightness of touch astonishes even more when you learn of his focal dystonia, a condition which leaves his left hand unpredictable and even uncontrollable. But any difficulty he might have is rendered completely invisible here and in Pisaro-Liu's Side By Side (2021). The first movement, for bass drum and cymbals, is exquisitely tactile, a study in texture and almost a deliberate avoidance of rhythm. Part two, for vibraphone and glockenspiel, exploits the attack and sustain of each instrument beautifully, gleaming streaks of sound hanging in the air. Let them decorate the space around you.

Stephen Vitiello and Bill Seaman - The Other Forgotten Letters Over the last four years, we have been graced with many riches in the realms of ambient and electronic music from Vitiello. While I have always found his sound art fascinating, I am even more heartened by the stand-alone music he has been releasing, of which this is one of the most accessible. A long distance collaboration with Seaman, also a sound and visual artist, the three pieces here are immersive and cinematic, with a temporal inevitability that belies the improvised origins of much of the music. A hall of memories, a landscape through rain-streaked glass, a tense film montage...close your eyes and let the guitars, pianos, synths, and percussion of Vitiello and Seaman work their magic. Much to my delight, the duo promises more is yet to come later this year. Don't get left behind. 

Seabuckthorn - Of No Such Place Both ethereal and dramatic, like a gritty but gorgeous film about survival, Andy Cartwright's latest under this moniker is one of his best. The guitar, treated and prepared, is always at the heart of these records, but once combined with field recordings, clarinet, tongue drum, and cymbals, it becomes almost immaterial. That said, Form Less Ness, an album he released earlier this year under his own name with only "a little obscured guitar," drifted far enough from shore that I could never be certain I actually heard it. Of No Such Place sticks with you.

Brian Eno - FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE "I think Eno has ascended to another plane," I said to my wife as we listened to this in jaw-dropped stillness. She agreed, marveling at the warm embrace of his deeper but still characteristic voice, mostly unheard since 2005, surrounded by gloriously rich textures. My statement had a double meaning, too, both referring to the utter majesty of the music and to the sense of godlike remove he was projecting across these 10 tracks. That was even before I read his statement that "I like creating worlds, that’s what I do as an artist, creating sonic worlds." Adding his voice, according to him, is like peopling his landscapes with humans. From on high, he's noting that our home planet has been much abused and we need to fall back in love with nature and appreciate all it gives to us. So, a climate change record, if you must. But you don't have to. It may just be enough to recognize that a world that gifts us Eno and his all-encompassing reinvention of drone-based song, just may be a world worth holding onto.

Molly Joyce - Perspective In writing about her last album, 2020's Breaking And Entering, I said of one song that it puts "wind in your hair as you pirouette through the ether in imagined flight." That sense of weightlessness, and of an artist coming into her own, made for a thrilling listen, and must have been equally thrilling for Joyce - who also identifies as a disability activist - to put into the world. On Perspective, you get a 360 view of what she was working against when cutting loose the bounds of the earth on Breaking And Entering. Each track features a variety of voices answering questions relating to their experience of disability: What does: access, control, care, weakness, strength, etc. mean to you? Listening to the answers is alternately sobering and inspiring and, yes, lends new perspective on how people with disabilities - like, say, my brother-in-law, blinded by retinitis pigmentosa - are forced to navigate the world. But even those of us without a disability but who have been confronted by the hardest tests life can throw at you can relate to much of this, as when the one speaker answers "What does resilience mean to you?" with "It's a never give in feeling." The music behind all these unvarnished sentiments is not unlike what we heard on Breaking And Entering: pulsing, looping electronics, sometimes with percussive elements, sparkling and full of forward motion. Joyce gives these brave speakers extra dignity by setting their thoughts in these exquisite frames. 

Corntuth - Letters To My Robot Son On his third album, the artist currently known as Corntuth, has pursued the programmatic nature of his music even beyond that of his first album, the self-explanatory Music To Work To, or his second, the impressionistic road trip of The Desert Is Paper Thin, into pure storytelling. The background he imagines for this album, created with his trademark vintage digital synths, involves a series of musical modules left by one of the last humans for his robot son, in the hopes that they might act as software and make him sentient. That series of sci fi thoughts leads to sounds that have the bright naiveté of early Bill Nelson solo electronica, like La Belle Et La Bête, alongside the soulful sensibility that has defined Corntuth's music from the start. A perfect example is E-003, which pairs a chilly repeating loop with some warmer and perfectly placed chords in a contrasting and wonderfully fat texture. One knock against the Yamaha DX7 when it first came out was that it took some of the creativity out of synthesis with a plethora of preprogrammed sounds. Perhaps like the robot son, the DX7 and Korg Poly-800 mkII, were just waiting for the right spirit to bring their ultimate humanity to the fore, which is exactly what Corntuth does on this enchanting album. 

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Listening To Lux On West 57th

Of Note In 2020: Electronic

Continuing on in my efforts to catch up with 2020, are the six electronic albums that have called me back the most. Listen to tracks from all them here or below, along with samples from the last post. For a wider view, scroll down for the full Of Note In 2020 (Electronic) playlist.

Roger Eno & Brian Eno - Mixing Colors Roger's name is first on this gleaming collection of electronic miniatures so I'm going to credit him with adding both melody and concision, two elements often lacking from Brian's recent albums. That's not always a bad thing, as no one else can put together an hour of generative ambiance like Eno did with Lux near the beginning of the last decade. But it was no accident that it was his more songful Small Craft On A Milk Sea that wound up on my list of the best of the 2010's. Mixing Colors is charming throughout, even nodding to Satie at times, and a dazzling display of textural variety. Even when Roger's piano comes to the fore, the sonics are likely the product of many wise choices. It's too easy to take Eno's genius for granted these days and not appreciate the music for what it is. Lose yourself in Mixing Colors long enough and who made it won't matter - but your environment may be transformed.

Seabuckthorn - Through A Vulnerable Occur If a shaft of light powers through a dense thicket to the forest floor, does it make a sound? Probably not, but if it did it might sound like this gorgeous album from Andy Cartwright. As he did on his last, A House With Too Much Fire, Cartwright treats his guitar and various other stringed instruments, building them up with loops and layers into something both monumental and diaphanous. While his music is great at painting pictures inside my eyelids, for some external visual information take a look at the accompanying art book by Australian photographer Sophie Gabrielle. You may just find it the perfect gift for that special someone with adventurous tastes. That special someone may also be you. I won't judge! Either way, delve into the world of Seabuckthorn however you can as there is literally no one else doing what he does.

Beatrice Dillon - Workaround You could breeze through this album and think all the tracks, though beautiful, are kind of the same. But further listening reveals nuances among the eely bass lines, crisp percussion, and chill keyboards. Clever samples abound, like the tabla of Kuljit Bhamra or the cello of Lucy Railton, but the experience is all Dillon and it is sublime. I'm no audio snob but I really lost myself in the sound when it bloomed in my Grado SR60 headphones, which is now my preferred method to listen to this dazzling debut.

Matt Evans - New Topographics Mea culpa - in a post earlier this year I called Evans "one of the best drummers alive," which is now revealed by this astonishing album as a severe undersell. Not only is Evans a master percussionist (catch him with Tigue or Bearthoven) but he is a deep thinker and sonic architect like few others. Taking inspiration from the high-concept thoughts of Timothy Morton, which classify massive classes of sometimes immaterial things - climate, the internet, styrofoam - as "hyperobjects," and a Richard Brautigan poem that pictures us "freed" to rejoin our mammal cousins while being babysat by robots, Evans constructs little landscapes of sound out of field recordings, percussion, and electronics. There's a cinematic structure to the album, too, with the bright, busy charms of the first three tracks giving way to the tense, nervous mood of Cold Moon. By the end, an equilibrium is reached, but it remains ambiguous. That's what I heard, anyway, you can choose just to toy with the marvelous textures as they go by. This also sounds great on headphones, but almost seems mastered for laptop - listening on my MacBook creates a space where sounds are spread in a radius of at least two feet. Or maybe infinity, held back only by my own biology. Don't let yours hold you back from hearing this masterpiece.

Nnux - Ciudad The project of Ana López-Reyes, Nnux was one of my favorite discoveries of 2018, and this short album is yet another example of why she grabbed me from first listen. The incantatory singing and nearly baroque electronics are in full force on several of the tracks, but I also hear new developments. She's giving her voice more room to breathe in parts, while also revealing more of her Mexican heritage on something like the title song, which has the ghosts of old ballads in its DNA. It's been a thrilling experience to be in Nnux's slipstream the last couple of years and I suggest you join me.

Yaeji - What We Drew Queens-born, raised in Seoul and now based in Brooklyn, Yaeji has been scattering singles and mixtapes like sweet little crumbs over the last several years, building a following that includes over one million monthly listeners on Spotify. Now she gives all those hungry ears the full cake with her delightful debut album. Pulling on at least the last 40 years of electronically-infused song craft, from house and drum'n'bass to hip hop and more avant garde realms, she proves the ruler of all she surveys, bringing a deliciously light touch to every tone, texture, and melody.

Keep up with everything I'm tracking in this category - and whatever comes next - here or below.

You may also enjoy:
Best of 2019: Electronic
Best of 2018: Electronic
Best of 2017: Electronic
Best of 2016: Electronic

Best Of 2019: Electronic

Even though I attempt to craft my posts to reflect my listening throughout the year, I heard way more electronic music than I wrote about this year. Something to work on for 2020! However, four albums that could easily fit in this category, Thom Yorke's Anima, Daniel Wohl's Etat, Drinker's Fragments, and Elsa Hewitt's Citrus Paradisi, were in my Top 25, so make sure you catch up with those ASAP. Now, on to all of the plugged-in things I've waited to tell you about, from ambient excursions to more aggressive explorations. At the top is a playlist so you can listen while you read - if you haven't already beaten me to these stellar records, I hope you find new worlds of transporting sound within.



Fennesz - Agora If you read the backstory, about Christian Fennesz losing his studio and moving all his gear back into the bedroom of his Berlin flat, you might expect something spare and lo-fi. Spare yes, with slowly building slabs of sound created by his guitar, laptop, field recordings, and the human voice. But also sonically magnificent, with rich, enveloping bass and sparkling highs. The approach is mostly ambient, but when the elements of melody emerge on Rainfall, it hits like warm sunshine. One imagines Fennesz's editing talents are as good as his recording skills to arrive at these four perfectly calibrated tracks. Let's hope we don't have to wait another five years for the next one! Note: Fennesz is on tour and will be appearing in New York on March 14th as part of the Ambient Church series - should be quite a night.

Seabuckthorn - Crossing Here we have another master of the guitar + electronics micro-genre, except Andy Cartwright uses mainly acoustic instruments to make his music, lending an organic feel to his soundscapes. Crossing comes just a year after the excellent A House With Too Much Fire and finds him moving away from the epic towards the gently hypnotic. There’s still some drama here, especially he when uses a bow to create flanging shafts of sound. Cartwright is just one of the most singular musicians working today and I highly recommend finding him in his niche. 

Mary Lattimore & Mac McCaughan - New Rain Duets I had to do a Google to confirm that this is that same McCaughan who leads Superchunk and founded Merge Records - indeed, it is! He must have been developing his synth skills in private as I never would have expected him to be such a sensitive partner for Lattimore’s harp. That instrument is the star, however, and the atmospherics and treatments amplify all of its glittering qualities, so surely expressed by Lattimore’s deft hands. The result is simply lovely. 

Visible Cloaks, Yoshio Ojima, & Satsuki Shibano - FRKWYS Vol. 15: serenitatem This series creates meetings of the minds that usually have me wondering how they could have ever been thought of, much less executed, such as the classic collab of California electronic gurus Sun Araw and M. Geddes Gengras with Jamaican harmony trio The Congos, which came out in 2012. This one is more of a straight line, with Visible Cloaks (Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile) displaying the influence of both Japanese ambient masters on their sublime Reassemblage in 2017. But just because it makes sense on paper doesn’t mean that serenitatem is any less surprising in how gorgeous it is.  In fact, even more so than any of their individual achievements, this album arrives at what seems to be a form of chamber music, one in which a collective memory or dream of what that could be provides the guiding force. It just sounds right, as if synthetic and acoustic instruments had always coexisted and there was no higher state of listening than to hear them together. Just fantastic and a new landmark in this remarkable series. 

Arp - Ensemble: Live! That exclamation point suggests that following up last year’s excellent Zebra (#18/25) with a live album seems to have surprised Arp mainman Alexis Georgopoulos as much as it surprised me. But those songs translate marvelously in this studio session performed by him and four other musicians. There are also new songs, giving us a snapshot of Georgopoulos’s methods almost as a work in progress. While Zebra remains an artistic peak for him, the delicious noodling here hints at new buds about to blossom on his creative vine. 

Daniel Lopatin - Uncut Gems Original Soundtrack I can’t tell you how someone who hasn’t seen this high-intensity movie would experience this soundtrack. But I can easily say that Lopatin (who usually records as Oneohtrix Point Never) made an enormous contribution to the film with these rich, pulsing, and occasionally bombastic tracks. Best thing he’s done and maybe he should borrow the emotional narrative from film more often. I doubt you’ll be able to turn it off - just as you can’t look away from Adam Sandler’s astonishing performance. 

Adam Cuthbért & John Adler - Scarlet Rising Moon Speaking of soundtracks, someone hand these two a script, STAT. Adler’s gleaming trumpet tells stories all on its own, and supported by Cuthbért's analog synths and dense beats, it’s a gripping tale indeed. Paging Blade Runner 2075 - your score awaits. Until then, I’ll make up my own interstellar epics as I listen. BTW, if you buy the nifty USB edition, you get 14 further minutes of this stuff plus a variety of intriguing extras. 

Elizabeth Joan Kelly - Farewell, Doomed Planet On her last album, Kelly was seeking escapism from the grind of long lines at the DMV. This time around, she has bigger problems on her mind. If that moment of exile comes, I can imagine watching the big blue marble disappear in the porthole while listening to her loopy melodicism and watery textures, which brought both Eno’s Apollo and David Torn’s guitar to mind. By the time we get to the chillier confines of Cosmonaut Chorus, however, our current home, with all its flaws - or more precisely, flawed inhabitants - starts to seem a little more welcoming!

Caterina Barbieri - Ecstatic Computation The title gives a hint of Barbieri's retro-futurist approach, which finds her putting Buchla modules through their paces to make melodic and immersive pieces that make the idea of synthetic music seem brand new all over again. The ecstatic part is maybe a reminder that electricity lives within us - as do mechanics - making for music that is strikingly human.

Suzi Analogue - ZONEZ V.4: Love Me Louder Speaking of ecstasy, whenever I can stop moving to her music, I sit in wonder at how she takes such simple elements - a kick, a snare, some pinging keyboards - and assembles them to create songs that are wickedly kinetic. Analogue occupies a wonderful *zone* all her own, adjacent to hip hop, r&b, and dancehall, but 100% electronic. Even such collaborators as RP Boo and Mike Millionz become mere ghosts in her machine - or fuel for the fire that will burn long after these tracks are ringing in your ears. P.S. Being that this is "The Audio/Visual Moodboard of Suzi Analogue," I would be remiss if I didn't point you in the right direction for some fun videos.

Hyperion Drive - Hyperion Drive This is a new collaboration between some old friends, Alice Tolan-Mee and Ethan Woods, who sometimes performs as Rokenri. This is a bit of a switch from the "chamber-freak-folk-tronica" I enjoyed on 2018's Mossing Around EP, being altogether sleeker, synthier, and sexier than that earlier collection. Tuneful, too, and unafraid to be just a bit weirder than the average electro-pop. Be the first on your block to own the cassette - unless you live on my block ;-).

Miro Shot - Servers This collective germinated in some of the ideas - both sonic and philosophic -  put forth by Roman Rappak when he was in Breton. Combining catchy melodies with dense electronics and lyrics that inquire about how technology, globalization, and our struggling planet serve to simultaneously bring us together and drive us apart, the four songs here are also part of a bigger plan to bring VR and AR to the concert experience. So far that has only happened in Europe, but this Breton fan doesn't need bells and whistles to be damned excited about what I've heard so far. More to come in 2020. Join the Collective - you just may find yourself contributing to their next video, as I did to this one.

Carolina Eyck - Elephant In Green/Elegies For Theremin And Voice/Waves (With Eversines) Eyck marked the centennial of the theremin with three releases giving an overview of her trajectory as she develops a repertoire of songs and sounds that combine her bell-like voice with the instrument. I had the privilege of seeing her in concert, which not only exposed me to her uniquely engaging stage presence but also gave me window into the structure of her music. While I'm not as taken with this direction as I was with her stunning collaboration with ACME (11/20, 2016), she's still doing something melodically, sonically, and emotionally that I can't find anywhere else.

Emily A. Sprague & Lightbath - full/new  While I've been familiar with the RVNG label for some time (see FRKWYS above), I only recently became aware of their space on the lower east side known as Commend. When I went there in November to see sets by Adam Cuthbért and Phong Tran I found a jewel on Forsyth Street, a small record store and performance space perfect for intimate performances like the one captured here. Sprague is also the singer-songwriter behind the charming Florist but has been traveling into ambience for a couple of years. Beautiful stuff, too, with stretched out chords supporting outgrowths that hint at the melancholy song-craft of Florist. Lightbath, the project of Bryan Noll, sparkles with the underwater hypnotism of early Eno instrumentals, which means I swoon as I listen. I think you will, too.

For more goodies in this vein, dial up my Of Note In 2019: Electronic (Archive) playlist and follow this one to see what 2020 will bring.

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Best Of 2018: Electronic
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Best Of 2017: Electronic
Record Roundup: Eclectic Electronics
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Outliers, Part 2: Seabuckthorn, David Garland

In Part 1, I covered two albums, one inspired by Greek Tragedy and the other by music history. The two records discussed below have more diffuse antecedents but no less musical impact.

A House With Too Much Fire - Seabuckthorn How vast is the world of music that an artist with this much talent and originality could have flown under my radar for so long? For this is the ninth release by Andy Cartwright under the name Seabuckthorn, which, as I have now learned, is a common shrub known for its nutrient-rich berries. Cartwright’s main instrument is the guitar and he usually plays 12-string acoustic or resonator guitars, often applying a violin bow to create drones. On A House... he has added banjo, clarinet, synthesizer and percussion to the sonic landscape, all of which he deploys with restraint and to great atmospheric effect. I have a lot of catching up to do but as far as I can tell, this is his most sophisticated and varied album thus far.

While there are still echoes of the American Primitive school of guitar, Cartwright is more interested in texture now. He rarely calls attention to his virtuosity in these 10 tracks, which are built up from layers of improvised parts and loops. Submerged Past, for example, starts with a finger-picked pattern that’s soon joined by spidery chords left hanging in the background before morphing into a stately ostinato, around which Cartwright develops more layers of picked and strummed elements with occasional strikes on the bell of a cymbal for emphasis. Gorgeous stuff. The spookier side of Daniel Lanois might be a touchpoint here, along with Ennio Morricone, Popol Vuh and even Tuareg desert blues. But Seabuckthorn really sounds like no one else and I hope this album draws more attention to his rich, organic sound world. A House With Too Much Fire comes out on June 1st - preorder it here. Cartwright lives in the Southern Alps but there is the possibility of New York City performance in the near future. Based on this video from March, I want to be there - how about you?

Verdancy - David Garland Starting in 1987, David Garland hosted Spinning On Air as a radio show on WNYC, quickly becoming a fixture on the airwaves and in the culture of New York City. His eclecticism, depth of knowledge and sheer love of music and creativity made it a must listen and often an unforgettable one. While WNYC cancelled the show in 2015, I'm delighted to report that Garland has revived it as a podcast and, based on the episodes I've heard, he has lost none of his curiosity or eloquence - subscribe here.

Over the years Garland has also been putting out his own music, featuring his wry vocals and sounds as much influenced by folk and rock as by classical music of all centuries. Verdancy,  which came out in March, is his first release in four years and may be his most ambitious project yet. It's essentially four albums worth of music, much of it performed by Garland alone on a daunting number of instruments. There are some intriguing collaborators including Iva Bittová (vocals, violin), Kyle Gann (piano), and Yoko Ono. Garland also handled all the technical aspects of recording, production, mixing and mastering. The artwork is his as well, with design by his wife, Anne Garland. Even if the music wasn't as wonderful as it is, Verdancy would be a landmark effort and an inspiration to independent creative people everywhere.

A central feature of the sound across the 27 tracks is an acoustic guitar modified with electronics by Garland's son Kenji. Apparently Sean Lennon is a fan as Garland borrowed one from him to record Verdancy. The hybrid instrument is "genuinely electro-acoustic" and provides washes of tonally rich chords for Garland to build on with the other instruments, often clarinet, which he plays beautifully. Part of the emotional well Garland draws on here is his move a few years ago out of NYC to the Hudson Valley, giving him an opportunity to commune with the natural world. Many of the songs do have an organic feel, seeming to grow from a kernel of an idea into something elaborate and deeply involving.

There are many highlights throughout the four albums, two of which arose out of collaborations across time. Color Piece, the first song, uses words from a 1964 poem by Ono, which Garland sings over a stately melody in a warmly meditative introduction to the world of Verdancy. Later on, there's Monteverdi's Lamento della Ninfa (The Nymph's Lament), based on a 15th century madrigal, which adapts surprisingly well to Garland's approach. Traveling Doors, a lovely piece for piano, clarinet and electronics, is another perfect point of entry. I could describe more of the beauties that await you but prefer you to discover them for yourself. I will say that out of all the songs here, Dear Golden Deer is the only one I would rather not revisit, as it pushes my personal tolerance for slide whistle past the breaking point. It might be your favorite track - don't let me stop you.

I can't encourage you enough to add David Garland's many virtues to your listening repertoire, whether through the riches of Verdancy or the ongoing inquiry of Spinning On Air. I would suggest both!

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Record Roundup: Eclectic Electronics
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