Crowell has been an in-demand musician round New York for greater than a decade – enjoying saxophone, flute and guitars with the likes of the Philip Glass Ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Steve Reich and in his personal outfits Empyrean Atlas, Spirit Stout and Eco-Tonal – however Level/Cloud foregrounds his work as a composer. Right here he delegates efficiency duties to a number of very completely different ensembles – different guitarists, a percussion troupe, a singer and cellist – to create a various suite unified by a singular imaginative and prescient.
Minimalism is commonly robotic, repetitive and melodically stunted, however Crowell’s minimalism is splendidly wealthy and harmonically complicated: busy arpeggios sketch out dense, prolonged chords that always mutate and transfer in sudden instructions. The three-part title monitor, like Pacific Coast Freeway, is a chunk of baroque flamenco with Daniel Lippel multitracking a number of electrical and nylon-strung guitars: it’s apparently impressed by Steve Reich’s Electrical Counterpoint, but in addition nods to Vini Reilly and John Fahey.
In a very completely different vein is the 15-minute opener, Verses For a Liminal House, a chunk of junkyard minimalism carried out by the New York quartet the Sandbox Percussion. It begins as a clattering symphony of arrhythmic percussion, like a drummer falling down an infinite staircase, and slowly foregrounds the serene, hypnotic harmonies of the marimbas and vibraphones, resolving as a chunk of Eno-esque atmosphere. In one more wildly completely different type is the nearer 2 Hours In Zadar, a haunting duet that units the woozy vocals and sketchy cello of Iva Casián-Lakoš alongside Crowell’s digital drones. All through, Crowell constructs geometric constructions which have a uncommon sense of kinetic vitality: that is music that glistens, sparkles and dances with pleasure.
Additionally out this month
Grammy-winning LA-based drummer Amy Aileen Wooden is finest identified for her work with the likes of Fiona Apple and her rating for the Netflix documentary White Sizzling. Her solo debut, The Heartening (launched 3 Could, Colorfield Information), remembers the scrapheap jazz of Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones blended with early Aphex Twin, with Apple amongst some intriguing friends. MMM (out now on Hallow Floor), by the Japanese composer and sound artist who goes by the identify FUJI||||||||||TA, is an odd and disconcerting mixture of gradual, throbbing, regularly mutating solo pipe organ compositions and growling scat-singing. SSRI are Polish duo Sandra Mikolajczyk and Igor Gadomski. They describe their music as “the darker fringes of dub”, however their self-titled debut LP (launched 29 April on Pointless Geometry) is lots weirder than that: a sequence of subaquatic funereal dirges, utilizing reverb results, slowed-down drums, eerie vocals and distorted drones. Whale reggae, if you’ll.
