If you listen closely to the many “lockdown albums” released over the past few years, you might hear a shared tacit understanding that the cultural reckoning isn’t over yet. Imperfect by nature and prefers escapism anyway. Spring 2020 resonates constantly but quietly.
does spring hide joyis a newly released long-form drone piece performed by electroacoustic composer Kari Malone on a sine wave oscillator with cellist Lucy Railton and Sun O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley. Conceived during a haunted moon three years ago. Malone never sought to create art that reflected the broader pandemic experience. Instead, she created a musical framework for exploring the evolving mindspaces induced by dull whiplash, giving listeners the space to imprint (or release) their own emotions and memories, and the illusion of time. focused on the characteristics. “Unlocked by familiar life milestones, days and months dripping and instinctively blending together with no end in sight,” she explains in an accompanying statement. Playing continuously for hours was a profound way to digest and spend time with countless life changes.” The pieces run in 60- to 90-minute instances, but each performance allows the relationship between material and its origin to change constantly.
Endurance is a long-standing element of Malone’s music, does spring hide joy Make it a central component. Each of his three presentations of the work featured in this release is one hour long (divided into 20 minute movements), and backed by a shared tonic drone, his one over three hours. Easily blends into the sprawling epic. The music breathes in slow motion, with heavy exhales of bass giving way to quiet consonant stretches before the next yawning gasp. The changes are ubiquitous and can be dramatic, but there’s a veneer of stillness that makes it feel like you’re observing a nebula swirl. Spectacle exists on a scale that is difficult to grasp at once. The most effective way to immerse yourself in a piece is to listen to the music that exists in the moment and listen to the gradual changes that unfold.
What Malone describes as a “hold”[ing] Spending time together involves the process of letting go of traditional musical boundaries of time and forming new boundaries. Drone music tends to be thought to lack a sense of rhythm, does spring hide joy It’s on a different scale than what many listeners are used to, and there’s plenty of it. You can record the non-regular moments when the Railton runs out of bow and turns. The constant ebb and flow of volume, intensity and dissonance that occur in cycles of tens of minutes provides another rhythmic perspective. But the most fascinating ones occur over a much shorter time spectrum. As the trio build microtonal harmonies, the quivering beats caused by harmonic interference contract and expand as the frequencies move out of phase and out of phase with each other. Depending on where the listener’s attention is, clock time, geological time, and quantum time are each observable.
