Phillip Golub: Filters
Greyfade Records

Knowing that the loops on Phillip Golub's Filters were executed in real-time by the pianist rather than generated by digital means makes listening to the thirty-four-minute vinyl album all the more engrossing. In place of the dehumanized perfection a machine-based setup would produce, Filters introduces personalized touches of the sort that naturally arise when a live performer's involved. It should be said, however, that the four tracks on the release aren't live documents in the purest sense. Golub performed each loop for forty-five-minutes or more during the recording sessions and then edited his favourite sections from the results to construct the versions on the album. Still, that doesn't make the sounds any less live-generated in their originating form.

While Filters is the NY-based pianist's solo debut, he's been part of many noteworthy projects. Born in 1993, he started playing piano at the age of five, began composing in his early teens, and eventually developed an interest in exploring the grey areas between notated music and improvisation. Consistent with that, he studied composition with Michael Finnissy and Julian Anderson and piano improv with Jason Moran, Ran Blake, and others. Golub's a member of Layale Chaker's Sarafand Ensemble, the co-founder of the quintet Tropos, and acted as music coordinator for …(Iphigenia), the opera collaboration between Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding. The pianist has, in other words, many irons in the fire.

Straddling minimalism, ambient, and experimental genres, the performances take on the character of rituals enacted in real time as opposed to a mechanical playback that can be presented at different times and contexts in the same form. Golub astutely recognizes that a listener attending to a recording where a person is executing the repetitive material will listen all the more closely and follow each pattern as it's executed. Admittedly, some degree of serendipity factored into the project's development. When he created the first loop in 2018, Golub thought it would form the basis for a more elaborate work. But the more he played what he'd written, the more he realized the loop was an artistically sound piece in itself. That led to the creation of more loops and the exploration of durational possibilities and arrangement—thought was given to orchestrating the loops for a chamber ensemble, for example. But as the formal recording of the project neared, he gravitated towards presenting the loops in a solo piano format and so booked time in summer 2019 to record the material on a privately owned Steinway D.

Structurally speaking, the loops are anything but random. According to Golub, two ‘streams' of music appear within each loop, a louder outer stream combining a high note and low note and a softer though denser inner stream that's, in his words, “a succession of simple major or minor triads—with an occasional suspended fourth or added seventh—that continually re-contextualize the colour of the pitches of the outer stream.” Helping to make the structure easier to understand, the horizontal and vertical definition of the first loop is shown in visual form on the album cover, the black outer stream framing the white-and-green inner. Whereas certain parameters of the performance are rigorously set, others aren't, with the performer able to customize rhythm and phrasing intuitively and according to personal preference.

October 2022