Its delicate gossamer sound-design is balanced by an endowment of something weightier; accretions of subtle microsounds are offset with a certain liminal dissonance, a sense that the air of calm is attended by a certain unease lurking at the edges.
[Purchase] When Austin, TX-based experimentalist Cory Allen called his new album Pearls, the hint of allusion to Budd/Eno’s The Pearl was perhaps unconscious, but not insignificant. Promo discourse refers to exploration of ‘existential landscape,’ which, as it turns out, needn’t prompt any angst-ridden posture, for Allen’s existentialism doesn’t translate into Dark Ambient isolationist brow-furrowing so much as (post-)Budd-ist meditational. Following up previous releases, The Fourth Way and Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears, Pearls is less conceptually indulgent than the latter, less liable to software-driven ravages than the former, and ultimately more satisfyingly realised.
Not for nothing is Allen’s imprint designated Quiet Design. Pearls is quiet indeed, yet is far from the flaccid pacifier generically envisioned at the mention of ‘ambient‘. Designed it most certainly is, though, in that, for all ambient’s eschewal of narrative, and the vagaries of its trajectory, it has the feel of something defined and developed over its four texturally related but distinct tracks. Allen generally limits himself to warm Rhodes-like keyboard tones and quiet sine waves, upon a grainy carpet of static – with varying degrees of pile. After the more difficult listening of The Fourth Way and the neo-Zen philosophical bent of Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears, the basics of music qua music are fully attended to over its four slow flow movements. Predominantly held in, contracted, then let out by degrees in stately expansionist gestures before being pared back again, opener “Strange Birds” set s the tone: dusty roads over which dusky Rhodes rides, or slow decay surfaces grazed by crackle rippling over a granular blur-pool. Sometimes a languorous undercurrent of dark bass pull. An initial feeling of stasis soon shifts in slow dissolves: “Lost Energizer” feels more aqueous, as if adrift; though its waters are not dark, there are undercurrents. “Isozaki Clouds” is further unmoored, denser synth pads – a suggestion of etiolated classical samples – and bassy drone currents, chimes coming to lighten late in the day.
Overall, Allen finely poises Pearls between minimalist thrift and neo-romantic drift. Its delicate gossamer sound-design is balanced by an endowment of something weightier; accretions of subtle microsounds are offset with a certain liminal dissonance, a sense that the air of calm is attended by a certain unease lurking at the edges. On the final “Blue Eyes” peripheral noise is reconfigured into a different design, the hail/hale of static and melodies more ex- than in-, mounting bass vectors providing a rich underpinning for a graceful cadence, as if tension were relenting, and something in the existential landscape might be moving towards resolution.
Pearls is out now on Quiet Design. [Purchase]
[audio:http://igloomag.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Cory-Allen_Blue-Eyes.mp3|titles=Cory-Allen_Blue-Eyes|titles=Cory Allen “Blue Eyes”]
