(12.22.06) Parent label Databloem’s website biog blurb has it that Robert Davies
“strives for an ethereal ambience, something dark but pleasant, deep and
entrancing”. So effortlessly achieved is this aim on Garden of Twilight
that talk of striving seems incongruent. A meditative calm rippled with
traces of brooding – undercurrents beneath a surface stasis. But it’s a
darkness more alluded to than displayed, a nature more obscured, composed
rather than revealed. The ambience of Garden of Twilight drifts on the
still glimmering side of the crepuscular, with no untoward strayings into
gloom. The spookiest moments are in the vague unquiet of “Entangled in Lush
Green,” mid-album, by which time we have already been largely lulled by an
oneiromantic Davies.
In fact, those sub-murmurs notwithstanding, the tenor of this Garden is
one of quiet richness. Part redolent of a Quiet Music Roach (ignoring the
specifics of tonality, and focusing instead on a commonality of sparing
painterly approach) with another soulmate spectrally attendant, sighted in
the neo-Richness of the delicate Rhodes-like modal motifs chiming through
“Iridescent Reflections.” And other moments where two Roberts meet. On some
pieces a Budd(ha)-esque aura pervades too – an almost Zen garden-like
serenity of texture and mood. But, to pursue these reference points further
comparatively, Davies is a little more involved than Rich in matters beyond
pure psychoacoustics and tonal rectitude, just as he is more exploratory in
terms of his tonal palette than Budd. He no more contents himself with a
just piano tonal minimalist approach than with the Just Intonation
tuning system. Having said that, Garden… is in the vein of The Pearl or
Plateaux of Mirrors, on the one hand, while being somehow akin in spirit
to the likes of a Rainforest or Sunyata, on the other. Situate it
halfway between a pensive solo keyboardist’s études (notionally with
uber-tasteful minimal cover on ECM) and a piece of atmospheric space
music soundscapery (on something like Hypnos, or even Hearts of Space),
and you’re about there.
There’s a slightly stand-offish elusive quality to Davies’s work, already
evident on his previous Sub Rosa, that precludes to direct emotional
engagement. Yet there is some strong sensation here, albeit sublimated. The
sense of semi-removal is a product of the inherent enshrouded quality of
the music – part of its subtle appeal. The blurred smear of keyboard tones
on “Hidden Colors Radiance” is so veiled and dissipated it’s as if it were
granted by an aural glimpse through a gauze curtain. But Garden… is no
sedate smile-on-the-void exercise. It may be ethereal, but not limply or
insipidly so. This is no bloodless study or supine snooze-fodder, however
withdrawn or distanced it may sometimes retreat.
On “The Ecstasy of Overgrown Sundials,” one can almost sense the artist
remotely contemplating fleshly pleasures – albeit transferred, no
quasi-ascetic driven by A Higher Quest for some pure microtonal nirvana.
This last-mentioned “Ecstasy?” almost parodically echoes the kind of
self-consciously precious poeticized track titles beloved of Mathias
Grassow (cf. ‘The Fragrance of Eternal Roses’), and in so doing seems to
knowingly allude to a keynote strand in Davies’ musical heritage. The
Grassow connection seems salient architecturally, especially on pieces like
“Lily Pond Sanctuary” and “Sunken Garden,” which pare down melodic figure
to such an extent that it merges into a single semi-still tone colour
field. Call a piece like this “Space Music,” but you’ll lose something of
its moments of faraway-closeness, of almost-intimacy. Call it “Drone,” but
you won’t do justice to elements of a subtly reduced harmonic sensibility.
In fact, Garden… is not at all a Drone work in genre terms, merely one
that incidentally deploys droning material to good effect, most pieces
being planted in an earthy bedding of singular sustain, among other
sonorous resources. The likes of “Beneath Strange Stars,” third generation
product perhaps of a casual coupling of Eno’s Apollo with some beat-free
90’s Fax emission, though none the worse for that, offer slow burning beauty
suspended in the inbetween, where light starts to ebb, near-dark as yet
faintly illumined. Davies’s signature chord would be neither minor nor
major, no 7th or 9th, neither augmented or diminished, but infinitely
suspended. Afloat in the serenely unresolved (candidate for next album
title?)
Garden of Twilight is out now on dataObscura.
