Moment Again Elsewhere is in many ways a perfect realization of this: a low-key smarty-pants dance that puts house (and home) into micro- of sound, setting up a tension between the pull of genre forms, the openness of instrumental play, and vectors of abstraction.
[Listen | Purchase] Paul Schütze once characterized his sound as hypertimbral cyberjazz. Not the most elegant of terms, it nailed a hybrid style he’d arrived at by the mid-90s. The tag occurred while trying to categorize the slippery Moment Again Elsewhere; not for any similarity to Schütze, but for the hyper aspect, and the allusion of the whole to a kind of knowing play of/with genre forms/terms. Something similarly hyper- and cyber- would be apt here, where dance is present but at several removes, and where home listening would be pipe-and-slippers prosaic. Morgan Packard might merit a microhouse, or a digi-dub, what with all his hark-backs to Mille Plateaux, ~scape, etc. – sundry indulgers in bedroom-atist 4/4-play, various click-shtick tricksters. Moving from then-reference to now-actual…
Anticipate is tailor-made for Packard’s cerebral-playful ambient-techno, a label which states its “[…] emphasis is on using electronics to rework, reassemble and redevelop sound […] from outside the computer, with the hope of finding the best balance of two worlds – creating something new and unique that has roots in our physical realm, but is abstracted in the digital one.” Moment Again Elsewhere is in many ways a perfect realization of this: a low-key smarty-pants dance that puts house (and home) into micro- of sound, setting up a tension between the pull of genre forms, the openness of instrumental play, and vectors of abstraction. This micro- is less house, the beat less techno-tronic, it could serve as an antidote, or at least a pick-me-up, for the ennui-afflicted techno-phile with a palette jaded from a diet of 4/4-square mnml.
The cascading piano motifs of “Unveil” provide a pointillist prelude, flowing free then picking up some tech kicks to add heft to a fibrillating flutter; Packard shows he has the Reich stuff, percussive filigree cleaving to the beat, recursions shifting in waves and folds. “Allow” and “Explain” serve as checks to the pulse. Propulsive pieces like the “Insist”-“Persist” couplet re-animate, the latter a tintinnabulating ~scape escapee, the former dipping into the cookie jar of Jan Jelinek, and all that Loop-finding jazz, all afroth, shaken and stirred with whirrs, dissolving into chimes. His preferred piano’s chord colourings sometimes hint at jazz while gratifyingly avoiding commitment; on “Window,” for example, has sneaky chord inversions slip-slide over comfy-queasy ambience, and a ludically glitching downtempo beat pattern. The dub-lounge workout that is “Moment” means something since it’s got that Akufen-esque post-swing to house its spectral sax and nagging keyboard clips. There’s a trompe l’oreille almost-inertia at times, at once push-pull, kinetic-static, with loops not layered but left to spool out, mesh and unmesh, then suddenly disappear. Like “Although,” which comes in spurts, terse bass pulse locked in to loose-rigid downtempo click-groove; vapours of suspended pads and granular static tides wash in and out, then all at once is gone, leaving only fragments of morose piano étude. Oddly effective and affecting. When time runs out, “Reveal” ends in grace, reprising the opening, further en-Reiched with phasing piano-falls.
With Moment…, there’s a sense in which Packard continues but departs from his previous Airships Fill The Sky, seeking a sound more like Packard. There’s more real to add to hyper – piano, already ID-ed – accordion and saxophone too; and his home-made software (Ripple) lending idio- to his sync(h)racy. Expansive textures submitting to nifty beat pinfalls, the resonance of instruments adding brea(d)th to their digital other half, retentive of their nature tones for all their consorting with electronic nexuses. Sounds pared down, techniques trimmed, influences effaced, existing codes deployed to give form and function – guideline not tramline; reverb on lite, a little dryer, less lush, less coloured by generic software shadings. And finally the mastering of Moment… showcases a sound less twitchy and bothered about what’s hot’n’punchy, more about balance, feel, breath, poise, grace. More like space.
Moment Again Elsewhere is out now on Anticipate. [Listen | Purchase]
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