Maxwell August Croy & Sean McCann :: I (Students of Decay)

A production at once maximalist and minimalist endows it with an architecture wherein each musical gesture peals to reveal—a spatiality with every emplacement lent heightened presence.

A hybrid of modern composition, ecstatic drone, and Americana with Eastern shades, this latest Students of Decay submission finds Sean McCann mixing up the modern composition medicine (cf. Music for Private Ensemble) while Root Strata man Maxwell August Croy folds in a variant on the processed instrument-alchemy of his electro-acoustic drone-basing gig in EN (see igloomag multi-view). For I they synchronize compositional and textural tropes to create something else again, the meeting of the exotic timbres of Croy’s koto with the prolific McCann’s keening strings defying the reviewer’s categorical imperatives.

The dynamic “Parting Light (Suite)” opens with a crystalline teaming of cyclic koto flurries, cello and violin, a breeze of wind, a blow of brass. The suite is segmented into passages of real-time instrumentation blooming into complex layering then passing to successive discrete settings. The multi-tracking facility of the studio is well deployed in timbral inquiries between classical minimalism—hinted at by a recursive habit, albeit countered by the instruments’ nature tones—and the aleatory tonal encounters of an improvised take on ambient-drone. Croy’s koto imbues proceedings with a delicate neo-Eastern air that plays around McCann’s more fulsome American pastoral, seen to its best on the vaulted harmonic overtones of “Alexandria”—the best a drone can get. Clarion call and mile-high string arrangements attain a sort of sun-struck grandeur, dense swathes drawn out languorously into a quietly stirring acoustic tone-mass. The keening sounds of violin, koto, and electronic drones resound, clear and present, a swell and relent of finger-fluttered and bowed strings. Other stylings are available, from the lush Eastern-sourced strings of “Hollow Pursuits,” which nods to classical Korean music, to the more rustic syncopations of “Momjii,” but their best is to be found where lilting plucks cleave to keening violin strokes–amid the ecstatic drone dream-scape, “The Inlet Arc.”

Though recalling other adventurers in similar sonics such as Gavin Bryars and Richard Skelton, I feels ultimately sui generis, its sonorities timeless. A production at once maximalist and minimalist endows it with an architecture wherein each musical gesture peals to reveal—a spatiality with every emplacement lent heightened presence.

I is out now on Students of Decay.