Marc Barreca: The Empty Bridge
Palace of Lights
K. Leimer: Found Objects
Palace of Lights
Palace of Lights
If anyone's deserving of a lifetime recognition award, it's Kerry Leimer. With unfailing consistency, he's been crafting quality electronic material for decades and has issued through his Palace of Lights label a huge number of recordings by other artists too. That he's been creative for so long surely merits attention beyond the acclaim his releases regularly receive. The accomplishment is brought home all the more powerfully by three recent Palace of Lights releases, one from the man himself and the others by long-standing colleagues Marc Barreca and Gregory Taylor. Strikingly packaged, each will no doubt add to the high regard listeners and critics already have for Leimer and his label.
Were one to listen in chronological order to Leimer's Palace of Lights output over the past ten or fifteen years, no doubt a clear sense of incremental development would emerge. Even if each advances upon its predecessor in almost unnoticeable manner, difference is nevertheless present. His latest, Found Objects, individuates itself through its manner of construction. Using the concepts of automatic writing and readymades as points of reference, Leimer applied a similar strategy to his own eleven-month undertaking, specifically by “repurposing displaced phrases and timbres, pitches, restatements, and treatments as the root technique.” Just as Duchamp recast a urinal or bicycle wheel as a gallery object worthy of aesthetic consideration, Leimer brought a similarly experimental mindset to the creation of the album's fourteen tracks. Consciously aiming to create a diverse collection, he produced material that both exhibits track-by-track contrast yet also retains clearly his signature.
Whereas some settings would fit seamlessly into the set-lists of earlier Leimer releases (see the crackling atmospheric flurries that make up “A Lapse in Suffering,” for example), others present new and unexpected sides. The percussive pattern underpinning “Subtitled” imbues it with a gamelan aura, however electrified the production is otherwise. “Opulent Lyricism” and “Idleness” are likewise distinguished by the wedding of slow, clattering drum patterns to shimmering electronic materials. Perhaps the most ear-catching piece is “Fanfare for the Illusion of Choice,” which assembles a droning stream of declamatory brass tones and loud percussive rumblings into a dream-like array, the latter effect intensified when the horns turn woozy in a couple of places. Acoustic instruments are prominent in “Asleep A Moment” too, with bowed cellos, muffled horns, and woodwinds lending the peaceful setting a chamber orchestral character. However much each piece reflects Leimer's sensibility, all include details that make them stand apart from one another.
Leimer's very much the model of the artist receptive to both serendipity and guided by a lucid sense of direction. One imagines each piece progressing through myriad stages of creation with him patiently testing out certain possibilities as the piece progresses. Though a list of production-related details does appear in the twenty-page booklet (much of it cloud photos) included with the release, the manipulations are so extensively applied, the focus rightly shifts from gear to the resultant sound design.
Of the other releases, it's Barreca's that's most complementary to Leimer's, even if The Empty Bridge was created from different materials (it's telling that the two have collaborated on a number of albums as well as released multiple individual efforts). Layers of synthesizers, samples, field recordings, and processed vinyl were used to generate the eleven tracks (five extra in the digital version), the result an immersive set of sonic landscapes teeming with detail. And landscape is the operative word: details provided reveal that a remote mountain cabin, a “broken concrete link to the city,” and pandemic-related isolation were involved in the album's production, and as a result Barreca's creative process was influenced by the surrounding environments: “the beauty and stillness of the Cascade Mountains and the muted industrial nightscape of the Duwamish Waterway, complete with its massive, now-condemned, empty freeway bridge.” Such contexts provided him with a resourceful wellspring for these saturated soundscapes to emerge from.
Like Leimer's release, Barreca's features pieces rich in contrast. The presence of acoustic bass—plucked and bowed—within the opening soundscape “City of Red Sand” instantly stamps the material with personality. It's hardly the only sound element, however, as the territory's filled with softly glimmering electronics and other processed elements, all of them coalescing to form an opaque electroacoustic tapestry. The resonant ping of (what sounds like) a struck water bowl surfaces during “Water Bell” until the element's absorbed into the flickering sprawl of the larger mass. A tad reminiscent of Leimer's “Fanfare for the Illusion of Choice,” “Appearance of Doubt” features muted fanfares of its own, albeit ones woven into a droning meander of organ embellishments and contrapuntal horn tones. Whereas “Aperture” features an intricate spiderweb of acoustic piano patterns, glassy shimmer, and willowy synth atmospheres, “Gargoyles” is a furiously percolating electronic swamp. Sonic landscapes are etched in all their painterly glory, with a given track unfolding as if each aspect is being taken in through a slow, panoramic scan. Time and again, Barreca shows himself a deft alchemist, someone sensitive to the subtleties of timbre and arrangement. The ghostly achromatic photo on the cover is hardly a mirror for the wealth of sound contained within.
Taylor's Peregrination distances itself from the others in multiple respects, two in particular: whereas his counterparts' releases feature ten-plus concise tracks, his presents four long-form pieces; more notably, Taylor's are heavily gamelan-influenced, though other traditions are part of the fabric too. The extended durations allow for an even deeper immersion than a shorter piece might afford, and the abundance of detail packed into each encourages even greater absorption. In titling the tracks to suggest both arrivals and pilgrimages, he creates a simultaneous sense of stasis and movement plus a feeling of time-suspension. The second chapter in a projected trilogy (the first, Retinue, appeared in 2019), Peregrination is the sixth Palace of Lights album by Taylor, who formally studied central Javanese Gamelan and electroacoustic music at various institutions.
Setting the scene,“Household Altars (Berterima Kasih)” expands across fourteen enveloping minutes from a sussurant cloud and faint traces of gamelan percussion patterns. Gradually the mass grows animated as the layers multiply, the atmosphere thickens, and the increasingly dazed listener's pulled into the music's world. Here and elsewhere, an impression forms of sweltering, humidity-drenched temple spaces with luscious acoustic sonorities reverberating within their ultra-resonant spaces. More animated still is “A Narrow Trail Westering (Keberangkatan),” which leaps into position with the heady swirl of hammered dulcimer-like patterns leading the way. With rhythmic propulsion deflating after six minutes, the material enters an oceanic dreamscape within which metronomic patterns of clangorous mallet instruments interlock. Whereas Peregrination turns restful for “The Old Summer Palace (Ingatan)” when piano redirects the recording into an alternate tuning realm, it picks up steam for “The Path to the Shrine (Ziarah),” which nudges the recording back towards energized electro-gamelan territory before easing into sultry mysticism.
Differences between the three sets aside, they're all polished Palace of Lights products that truly flatter Leimer's long-time label project. The care all three producers invested into their releases is never less than evident, and the visual presentation is thoroughly enhancing in each case.April 2021