Mountain Coast: Phases
Shifting Paradigm Records

One of the tracks on Phases, the sophomore effort from Denver-based Mountain Coast, is clearly indebted to the phasing concept famously associated with Steve Reich; the six others, however, sound like nothing else than the personalized spawn of Michael Bailey, Dave Devine, and Kenny Warren, even if the album generally locates itself within the experimental-ambient field. Here's a case of musicians leaving influences behind and working intuitively and collaboratively to produce wholly original material. Connections to the work of other artists might be proposed, but Phases registers as a pure Mountain Coast creation.

Certainly a key reason for that has to do with instrumentation and approach. Recording remotely during March 2021, Bailey processed Devine's baritone guitar and lap steel and Warren's trumpet and trombone tracks using various effects, samplers and modular synthesizer, the results of which generated new layers to improvise over. Such a methodical MO is painterly in the way a setting evolves as it's developed, its final shape perhaps entirely different from anything its creators envisioned at the outset. Electronic production strategies fluidly merge with improvisation on the release, making for texturally detailed soundscapes that are unpredictable but not directionless.

The three—all Denver natives, though Warren's Brooklyn-based—have been collaborating for about twenty years and have obviously developed advanced degrees of trust and connection. Each brings something special to the trio project: Devine's a known quantity in the Denver jazz and rock scene and is also a member of Invisible Bird with trumpeter Shane Endsley (Kneebody) and drummer Scott Amendola (Nels Cline Singers); inspired as a youngster by trumpeter Ron Miles, Warren moved to NYC in 2002 to study jazz at at SUNY Purchase and become part of the improv music scene; and Bailey shifted his focus to modular synthesis and music production after obtaining a BFA from The New School in saxophone.

Titled after Jeff Eliassen, a photographer friend of the group, “4Jeffe” establishes the recording's airy, free-floating character, its hazy dreamscaping generated from lap steel washes, Jon Hassell-like trumpet playing, and a dense base of sampled guitars. Exemplifying the trio's resourcefulness, “Common Dolphin” uses a field recording Warren made while on a San Francisco boat to view dolphins, with the drone of the boat's motor used as the bass tone and pedal note in the track. There are parts of “Flor De Miedo” that could pass for a degraded orchestra recording from a hundred years ago being heard back through an equally broken-down radio. Here and elsewhere, Mountain Coast smudges and smears its elements into roiling, abstract masses, with trumpet occasionally extricating itself from the whole to add a familiar instrument timbre to the mix.

“Phase II” distances itself from the other tracks, not only for the way it riffs on Reich's phase shifting concept but also for giving so much of the arrangement's focus to trumpet. Even so, the trippy swirl of the presentation aligns it seamlessly to the album's other dizzying set-pieces. Phases is proudly experimental, and its creators are to be commended for creating material that's uncompromising and true to their artistic impulses. That doesn't mean it's unlistenable: anything but a noisefest, the thirty-six-minute set is easy on the ears (see the soothing, pastoral-styled meditation “November 23rd,” for example) and striking for how effectively it weaves horn and guitar textures into its ambient makeup.

November 2022