Cerberus Vol.3(15)
Featuring review of Susan Alcorn (Janel Leppin), Green-House, Matt Robertson, Balmorhea, and Tape Deck Mountain
I have so much I want to say but am at a loss for the words to say them. I’ll just try to say it in this way:
I’m trying to do my part to be a light in the lives of those around me. I hope, despite your own travails, you are as well. And it shouldn’t be dismissed how positive of a force art is. I’m sure it’s why I keep returning to it in my times of need, which explains that I’m not at a point where my record “collection” — which was once contracting — is now starting to slowly expand again. Thanks to all of you who are creating the art (new and old) that is helping me be the light that others around me may need.
Susan Alcorn (Arranged by Janel Leppin) — The Heart Sutra
One does not equate pedal steel playing to classical composition, but this was a life’s pursuit of Susan Alcorn. The noted pedal steel player became the impetus for the instrument gaining gravitas outside its traditional motifs and models. Its place in sweeping ambient and thrilling drone compositions is well-worn by this point, but The Heart Sutra brings the instrument into a sextet setting with wildly vivid results.
Arranged by Janel Leppin, The Heart Sutra brings Alcorn’s pursuits to life with the gusto of impactfully lingering chamber music. Leppin creates not only for the pedal steel that buoys Alcorn’s work, but for each instrument in the ensemble to create natural reverberations and spacings within and outside of the pedal steel. The results blend into a story, not unlike the music of early 20th century Russian composers (Asafyev, Prokofiev). There is tension, timbre, and timidity as each instrument delicately weaves together. Sometimes there are clashes, but often one sound demurs in favor of another.
Though The Heart Sutra is nearly a decade-old live performance, its power seems more palpable in this moment. Much of the recording is airy, almost isolated from the crowd and circumstances in which it was performed. The prim elegance of “Mercedes Sosa” giving way to the primal scratching within “Gilmore Blue” — a delay in how an idea is processed and rebroadcast like a game of Telephone askew. Within that vacuum, Alcorn’s work and Leppin’s interpretations toy with the SMCR model of communication where we’re already experiencing interruptions to those patterns due to politics and pandemics. But here it is a worthy experiment.
Matt Robertson — Enveleau
Robertson has been a collaborator with Bjork, Pet Shops Boys, and Ellie Goulding, helping to shape and stretch their respective music (both live and recorded) in interesting manners. With Enveleau, his latest solo release, Robertson does the same with the various genres he chooses to explore.
Make no mistake, Enveleau is a strange brew of copacetic, yet competing musical ideologies. But its tactic is immersion: if you don’t notice, or choose to ignore, the predefined values of what constitutes the boundaries of genre, Robertson does what a composer should: eschew definitions in favor of the earthly.
This doesn’t mean Robertson is making hard, unmalleable music. “Kalimba” is perhaps the roughest tumble Enveleau provides. It has a pulsating pattern that slowly builds and expands into a near-techno frenzy before collapsing inward, before exploding forth with a different, more diverse foundation. It’s the power of Mt. St. Helen’s exploding part of its facade outward out of sheer will. It proves that seemingly immovable objects, with enough pressure and time, will eventually force the issue.
But Enveleau does not shy away from the meditative, even while remaining dynamic in its movement. The album’s title track is richly textured ambience slowly peeling itself away from the song’s muscle. Soon its sinewy structures are open to the surrounding air, while its veneer slowly evaporates into the mists.
Underneath all of it are beats — both pronounced and muted — that call to Robertson’s grounded technique. As spiritual and galactic as his compositions go, there’s a very palpable pulse that beats throughout. It’s a network of veins, arteries, organs, and instruments that keep it moving. And because of this dynamism, it cannot be wholly defined by one descriptor or phrase. All you need to know is if rhythm and space speak to you in equal measures, Enveleau is a force of nature worth the exposure.
Balmorhea — The Wind
With each passing year, the boundaries surrounding the idea of genre continue to expand into a vast Venn diagram of overlaps where genre becomes inconsequential. However, classical powerhouse Deutsche Grammofon have largely stayed true to modernist expressions of the classical in its most sharp and original forms. But even DG is not immune, or adverse, to the changing tides.
What constitutes classical music or classically-inspired composition is rapidly changing and the label with the iconic logo and design is evolving with it. We’ll skip over the recent release from Moby in favor of something far more striking, more genre-bending, and largely, far more beautiful: The Wind from Texas duo Balmorhea.
Rob Lowe and Michael A. Muller have crafted a gentile, sweeping ambient album that centers itself around circular melodies, but each composition uses this simple, delicate base for different effect. “Rose in Abstract” is a quietly-played piano melody that builds with swatches of ambient texture before suddenly, but faintly fading into nothingness. “Landlessness” builds itself around a lush acoustic guitar melody, allowing the open space of the recording — along with sweeping fingers across the strings — to fill in the gaps. It’s less classical in nature and more folk-pop, but the song is buoyed by the slightest sounds before strings add a moving, dynamic layer to the song’s canvas.
Subtlety is at the heart of The Wind, taking on the characteristics of the titular force of nature. Very rarely does wind take on its most physical and ferocious form; for many, it’s a gentle, ever-present breeze. Others may experience it in fits and starts. It’s similar to our collective admiration of classical composition. Whether you enjoy the wind on any particular day is given to the circumstances of its presence. Similarly, the compositions you may be hearing must speak to your mood and the moment when you hear them. But both are always existing, always changing, always pushing forth into new territories. And this, too, is the results on Balmorhea’s The Wind.
Tape Deck Mountain — True Deceiver
An album that subverts and embraces shoegaze in equal measures, True Deceiver does find commonality in embracing what both opportunities offer: power. It is a loud, forceful album that uses shoegaze brutality to envelope listeners with a barrage of hard rock and soft pats. This is none more apparent than the ill-titled “Hush” where the verses are a bit subdued by Tape Deck Mountain standards (the lyrics are more entwined with the title’s theming), but the swirling, gnarled guitars awash in feedback and effects are hardly quiet, nor is the driving bass line that keeps the melody moving forward. Then the song just becomes faded screaming (“You don’t say much…”) and loud cymbal crashes.
The real magic of True Deceiver is disguising a lot of 90s rock in a modern palette, and yet not really hiding the intent. The album takes its cue just as much from grunge as it does shoegaze, but never falls completely into either bucket. And the band does just enough with texture, flow, and sound to escape definition altogether. But if you’re looking to feel familiar itches, True Deceiver will be your back scratcher.
Green-House — Music for Living Spaces
I once carried a debate in the mid and late 90s that Beck was better than Enya with a friend of mine. She was largely arguing against Beck and not so much for Enya, but we would both snuggle up on her couch watching MTV and other terrible television while commercials hocking Pure Moods compilations and albums from the master of the pan flute, Zamfir, to us in between videos of Metallica, Cake, and Dr. Dre. When I tell you that the 90s, despite being infamous for turning the tail end of Gen X and the dawning of Millennials (which are now dubbed Xennials because we make everything portmanteaus in our new reality) into apathetic creatures purely for marketing purposes, it was definitely a wild west of commercialism. The lid had been ripped off the suburbs and most rural communities that had vast cable packages. And though the real world wasn’t being shown (because they had to show The Real World), there were glimpses of what lay outside the screen door.
Now it’s 2021 and I happily, gladly, consumingly admit I was wrong. Enya was the better artist and visionary. It’s hard to argue with a woman who lives in a castle (not named Rowling) and creates magical music that feels as if its bubbling from the earth. This world of New Age (which is not a term or genre defined by Enya’s work but her commercial peak brought it new masses) has continued to blossom outside the reaches and purviews of the mainstream. Its magic is ever-spreading, influencing the work of more popular (and pop) artists. But it has never left the feeling of speaking to and for the Earth behind.
This is embodied by Olive Ardizoni AKA Green-House. They are a magical being, crafting music that speaks to an Earth in constant turmoil by focusing energies on the meditative and restorative spirit by which we are all bound. Music for Living Spaces isn’t as sweeping as her New Age counterparts, nor is her work as narrative. But her idea of creating music that captures “the emotional state that you’re in when you perceive something as cute” is fulfilled exponentially. Which is why I return to a faux argument from my youth because it was the action of butterflies and breaking the ice. It was a cute moment from my past that continues to have that same effect on me. Music for Living Spaces easily pulled it out of me, its swirling melodies feeling like the toys for an active imagination and steel-trap memory. Ardizoni’s music comports with the ideal mental state of cuteness. I feel the warm blanket of happy thoughts wrap around me when “Soft Coral” plays its docile tones for me, splashing my mind with subtle timbres that recall happy moments.
Without being mystical, Music for Living Spaces does not hold the strange majesty of Enya or Enigma. But it’s why I find myself gravitating toward it more than the old guards of New Age. The magic is more fairy dust than Houdini, less guarded and more available in the mana of the earthly bound. It’s an energy we’re able to create ourselves, and Ardizoni just provides the tools to pull it out of us.
