Jeff Greinke: Before Sunrise
Spotted Peccary

An exquisitely nuanced collection of ambient chamber music, Before Sunrise blurs the lines between classical and electronic genres in the most striking manner imaginable. Jeff Greinke's been crafting music and releasing recordings for decades, and the sensibility the sound sculptor, artist, and designer has refined over the course of that production period is evident in every fibre of the recording's being.

A project like Greinke's that pairs live musicians with electronic textures and embeds their playing within soundscape structures can produce a result where the contributions of the acoustic players feels grafted onto the backdrops crafted by the electronic artist. Not so here: Before Sunrise sees the two components integrated seamlessly, with all elements working in tandem to achieve specific ends. No account of the fifty-seven-minute release would be complete without acknowledging those who so splendidly augment Greinke's keyboards, electronics, and samples, even if their contributions appear on only half of the album's eight pieces: string players Paris Hurley, Alex Guy, Austin Larkin, and Dylan Rieck; trumpeter Lesli Dalaba, woodwinds players James DeJoie, and Greg Campbell on French horn, vibraphone, and hand drum.

Establishing the album's tone, Greinke builds a multi-dimensional meditative space using vibraphone, bass clarinet, strings, samples, and electronics in “High Flyers of the Night Sky,” its sense of mystery nurtured with masterful patience by the composer. Amidst the thrum of insects and the low-pitched utterances of the bass clarinet, the trumpet's sparse declamations call to mind the similarly lonely sound of the horn in Ives's The Unanswered Question. Such an association aside, the material exemplifies the meticulousness with which Greinke assembles his elements into painterly wholes.

Track titles aren't without a programmatic dimension, but even if generic titles had been used the pieces would still be strongly evocative. Strings figure prominently in the arrangement of “Slow Train on an Open Plain,” lending the piece an elegiac character that very much conveys qualities of loneliness and desolation. By comparison, the combination of muted trumpet, hand drum, clarinet, and electronics gives “The River” a somewhat exotic, even Fourth World character that suggests affinities with the music of Jon Hassell or David Toop.

With respect to the solo productions, “Night Watch” is Greinke in deep Eno mode, the atmospheric ambient soundscape powerfully suggestive of a nocturnal harbour setting when the only sounds intermingling are those of wind and water. Using acoustic piano as the front-line instrument in the peaceful, New Age-styled reverie “Rain, Then Snow” adds a wholly different dimension to the recording, as does the prominent role accorded DeJoie's flute in the slow-motion title piece, a move that deepens the quiet grandeur of a twelve-minute moodscape that in its closing minutes approaches the profound stillness of an Arvo Pärt composition.

May 2018