Robert Scott Thompson: Pluviophilia - Pallaethesia
Aatma

Growing up in the Los Angeles area, Robert Scott Thompson came to love the magic rain brought to the city's streets, the way rivulets ran along the curbs and how water bathed everything in a shimmering glow. For a composer, rain inspires for the moods and associations it engenders but also, of course, for the sound it makes striking surfaces. Direct inspiration for his Pluviophilia (“love of rain”) project, a meticulously crafted three-disc collection close to three hours in duration, were field recordings of rain he gathered and then processed into melodies, chord progressions, and textures; rain sounds also occasionally surface in an untreated form.

Representative of the trilogy is its first part, Pallaethesia, which, like the second and third, Pluviophilia and Cartographies of Time, was created by the composer at his studio, The Resonance Observatory, in 2019. The six pieces on Pallaethesia reveal Thompson's reached an inordinately high level of sophistication and poise as a sound designer, its opening piece “The Wheel of Cloud Whirs Slowly” a case in point. Stately in character, the material blossoms slowly with a dense harmonic field awash in plucked string melodies, flute-like flurries, and vaporous swirls. As abstract as the material is, it's not lacking in mood, with an aura of melancholy in this instance shadowing the production.

There are passages on the release that sound like environments Miles Davis might have created had he not stepped away in ‘75 but kept issuing material (even the title, Pallaethesia, sounds like something the trumpeter would have used for one of his mid-‘70s live releases). Hints of muted horn even seem to seep into “Slow Burning Embers Fade,” an otherwise droning sound mass that unspools across eleven meditative minutes. During this shadowy lament, elements congeal into a viscous sound world peppered by bowed metal textures, bird chatter, and diseased, horn-like wail. “Dryline Chaser,” on the other hand, flirts with tribal ambient in merging subtle rhythmic pulsing with low-pitched grumblings that suggest some tangential connection to Tuvan throat singing.

Following as it does three immersive meditations, “Pallaethesia” startles for presenting a more conventionally structured exercise in electronica. Using a muscular beat pattern as a foundation, Thompson overlays single-note patterns of acoustic piano, the combination generating a subtly radiant result that's more instrumental song than soundscape. Consistent with its title, “The Wind Begun to Rock the Grass” alludes to atmospheric disturbances and the signs that portend their arrival. Perpetuating the style of “Pallaethesia” but darker in tone, the piece again weaves beat elements and piano into an electronica framework. Thompson borrowed a line from the sixteenth-century song “Westron Wynde” as the title for the album's closing piece “Small Rayne Downe Can Rayne.” However much it's tied to medieval times, stylistically the material is the one piece on the recording that comes closest to evoking Eno and Harold Budd, especially when the minimal acoustic piano notes are bathed in reverb and the feel is so becalmed.

February 2020