Todd Gautreau‘s fourteenth outing in Tapes and Topographies guise, is a set of ten impressionistic sonic vignettes painted with delicacy in vaporous colors.
Gauzily limned looping sonorities
Modalities (n., pl.) – relating to qualities or circumstances that denote mode or manner, the classification of propositions according to contingent truth value, possibility, impossibility, or necessity, or one of the primary sensory forms, e.g. vision or touch. The nature of this concept’s transposition to musical articulation is just one of several engaging qualities of this latest collection from Tapes and Topographies.
An ambivalently emotive mission restatement following A Season of Loss (Simulacra), A Pulse of Durations (Past Inside The Present) and previous on Dronarivm, Shimmering Moods, and Whitelabrecs, Modalities, Todd Gautreau‘s fourteenth outing in Tapes and Topographies guise, is a set of ten impressionistic sonic vignettes painted with delicacy in vaporous colors. With its gauzily limned looping sonorities doused in treated field captures, it is evidently in the timbral and spatial elements of sound quality that the semiotic potential of the eponymous concept of the album is explored. Early on pellucid chords and motifs seep suggestively into your head projector as the pieces proceed, their textures progressively more, or differently, FX-wreathed (“The First of Many Moons”) or decay-affected (“Devolve”), drifting over tape-saturated contours. Gautreau’s glass is one through which figures are glimpsed if not darkly then dimly, as on “With That Being Said,” which adopts a similar habit, stretching it out further; “The Worn Surface of Heart” strips down to a simple guitar motif, but takes it to the feedback limits, with the DSR of the envelope pushed in a series of slow falls inward and folds outward, while “There’s Something You’re Not Saying” has the unsaid simply sublimated in a fizzing field of fuzz.
Ultimately, though a note of Weltschmerz may be a constant, a remote tenor of hope and resolve, somehow sustains itself through the ennui, asserting its resonance ringingly on the final double-handed gambit of “Countenance” and “Happenstance.”
Modalities is available on Simulacra. [Bandcamp]
