Monty Adkins: Borderlands
Audiobulb

Monty Adkins' fourth album for Audiobulb signifies a bit of a departure for the English sound artist. While it retains firm ties to the ambient, electronica, modern classical, and experimental electronic music genres from which his previous work has drawn, it differs in being a single-track meditation of thirty-eight-minute duration. Based on a text by Deborah Templeton that focuses on liminal states of consciousness, Borderlands is primarily modern classical in style and sounds acoustically pure and free of electronics.

However, while the piece appears to be played by a cello section, it's performed by a single musician, cellist William Mace, whose playing has been multi-tracked for the recording. And while on the one hand it plays as a single, continuous piece of orchestral character, technically speaking Borderlands consists of six interludes and six extended panels, each comprising twenty-eight short melodic fragments and each using the same fragments to form new melodies and harmonies. It's likely, however, that the work's formal design will go unnoticed by the greater number of listeners, for the simple reason that their attention will instead be drawn to the luscious sound of Mace's playing and his sympathetic rendering of Adkins' material.

In general, the tempo is slow and stately and the mood peaceful and plaintive, qualities that in turn bolster the recording's immersive potential. Paradoxically, a sense of stasis and time-suspension is achieved by Adkins' meditative music despite the facticity of temporal extension and the myriad melodic events that transpire during the music's unfolding. In one more example of aural sleight-of-hand, the overlapping of high and low pitches generates the impression of a string section containing violins, violas, and cellos as opposed to a cello section only. There are moments of great beauty here, such as when a solo cello line soars gently above a shimmering swell below.

February 2015