January Dusk is an attractive combination of the concrete and physical and the unspecific and abstract.
On January Dusk, James Landis’ guitar tells brief, allusive anecdotes while his electronics describe the long, sallow arc into darkness of a winter afternoon. His musical novellas are striped with deep purple, rousing feelings of empathy and comfort, even though the opening track, “Riverbed,” with its endearingly crummy drum machine, is pretty spooky. The warmth begins radiating outward with “Slow Thought,” the first in a series of poetic miniatures woven with guitar strings both both skinny and shallow and fat and rich, against circumspect electronics, sometimes quietly buzzing and misfiring, sometimes quietly empyrean.
“Unhappy Past” is paradoxically the most light and melodic of his short pieces. “Eight Miles from Home,” on the other hand, stretches to a full eleven minutes and is kind of cottage industry ambient, softened metal being shaped between hammer and anvil. Though nibbled at like the end of a favorite pencil by discreet electronics, January Dusk is an attractive combination of the concrete and physical and the unspecific and abstract.
January Dusk is available on Cathedral Transmissions.
