John Atkinson + Talya Cooper: Plains
Florabelle
Josh Mason: Coquina Dose
Florabelle
Ned Millligan's Florabelle is a boutique label designed for small-run editions, but the material on its latest vinyl releases definitely deserves to be heard far and wide, especially if your taste runs to pastoral folk-ambient hybrids. Both are enriching sets that command your attention and leave you feeling amply rewarded for the time and attention given to them.
Plains, the collaborative spawn of Talya Cooper and John Atkinson, evolved out of the score the two created for Two Plains & A Fancy, a Western-styled film by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn. Whereas Cooper and Atkinson purposefully aligned short musical pieces to scenes within the film for the soundtrack, Plains freed them from operating according to any guidelines but their own (in a nice move, Florabelle's augmented the LP purchase with downloads of Plains and the original Two Plains & A Fancy soundtrack, allowing for a fascinating comparison study).
With field recordings by Federico González Jordán from Colorado's San Luis Valley included, Cooper (guitars, vocals) and Atkinson (synthesizer, processing) conjure restful oases of widescreen entrancement. The A-side's “Chillien” is the album's peaceful centerpiece, a side-long foray into gently flickering drones whose bright glistenings at times suggest the sounds of a calliope. Accented by whirring guitar fragments and firefly-like punctuations, the setting advances at its own stately, slow-motion pace, indifferent to the chaotic tempo by which so much of the world operates. The music's effect is somewhat like a country pool whose placid surfaces are continuously disrupted by the rapid movements of water bugs. Flip the vinyl over for three more pieces, starting with “Cloudless,” a wavering drone meditation that expands to epic, even majestic proportions, and carrying on to “Geologer,” a softer excursion where guitar fragments chime alongside vocal susurrations and rumblings. “Seconds” takes the release out with eight minutes of psychedelia-sweetened and organ-drenched atmospherics. If, as another soundtrack has it, “Grease is the word,” with Plains it's engrossing.
Complementary to it is Coquina Dose by lifelong Florida resident Josh Mason (Dauw, Desire Path, Scissor Tail). In contrast to the soundtrack-related origins of the Cooper and Atkinson set, Mason's guitar-and-tape-generated collection draws in part for inspiration from his connection to the Southern state, specifically the experience of living there, how it's seen by others, and its identity as a “humidity kingdom.” At the outset, “Crack the Juice Code” establishes a peaceful mood when tiny fragments of guitar softly burble within a streaming cloud of hiss and static. That tonal character extends throughout the album, reaching a particularly pretty peak in “Hermitic Chime,” after which “Pelagic Scout Badge” reveals precisely how moving such music can be when created by a sensibility so attuned to sound details and their effects.
Though its pastoral placidity is far removed from the noisier music Markus Popp's released as Oval, Mason's material does, like Popp's, percolate animatedly, filled as it often is with all manner of electronic glimmerings; the differences between the artists' work diminish even more when Coquina Dose is heard next to 1998's Dok, one of Popp's more subdued Oval efforts (it was, more precisely, the product of a soundfile exchange between Popp and Christophe Charles). There are also moments on the album, “Condos” for example, where Coquina Dose matches the becalmed material a label such as Inner Islands excels at bringing into the world. “Key Blight,” on the other hand, individuates itself by coupling outdoors field recordings with the liquidy warble of electric guitar (much the same could be said of the closing minutes of “Pelagic Scout Badge”). Whatever differences separate one track from the next, there's a warmth and peacefulness about Mason's music that heightens the recording's appeal. With its ten pieces being shorter statements, no single track on the album stands out as much as “Chillien” does on Plains, but the cumulative effect of Mason's set is nevertheless comparable to the latter's. These are releases that for maximum impact should really be experienced together.June 2019