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Further developing on the ideas behind the album Pearls, Allen returns with his latest offering, Still. On this release we discover beautiful dream-like sounds which seem to hover as they gently flow through textural transitions and subtle melodic evolutions. Fluid Radio, Nathan Thomas And of course there is the whole issue of form, of whether nature could be said to have form or whether it is simply random, whether we impose our our impressions of form upon it or whether the appearance of form is nature appearing as nature through us. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of “Still” is the way in which form appears as something that emerges out of the music itself, rather than being imposed upon it from the outside. Individual elements – chiming, hissing, marimba-like or brittle – are encountered seemingly by chance, yet the whole is cohesive and complete, having a clear wholeness to it. This is the nature of sand dunes and snowflakes, patterns distilled from orderless components (because it is still true to say that sand knows no dune!). This is not the imitation of nature, but the imitation of natural beauty – not the imitation of an object, but of a certain process of appearing or happening. Cory Allen’s last album “Pearls” was highly regarded by many, and the release of “Still” should only further enhance his reputation as a maker of intelligent, perceptive, beautiful music; fans of Marcus Fischer’s “Monocoastal” and other recent 12k releases should find Allen’s work slotting nicely into their collections. Currently there seems to be a wealth of new music being released that engages creatively and imaginatively with nature and the productive tensions between the organic and the digital, and “Still” places Allen among the leading lights of this movement.
“Shutter Echo” introduces the album on somewhat of an alien note with the slow-motion swirl of cavernous whirrings, fuzz, flutter, and other grainy noises until the comfortingly familiar presence of an electric piano arrives in the form of sparse and meditative meander—the effect a little bit reminiscent of the way in which Robert Wyatt's piano humanizes Eno's ambient colourations on the opening piece of Music For Airports. The presence of what sounds like amplified vinyl crackle gives “Goodbye Ghost” a suitably spectral character, as if the ghosts of recordings past have been exhumed and re-awakened. That surface texture also resembles the kind of ambient ripples one hears at the seashore, which in turn lends the piece an open-air expansiveness that's present to a lesser degree on the other pieces. “Goodbye Ghost,” one of the two most densely textured settings, could pass for a processed field recording taken at an early morning harbour, where myriad creaks and rustlings meld into a muffled whole. Real-world sounds intrude to an even greater degree during “Ascension” when the overlapping bell tones of various clocks and the utterances of creatures overshadow the melodic elements. Still isn't without its darker moments, either, as shown by the second half of “Becoming” when the threat of an oncoming storm spreads itself across the track's droning flurries. Throughout Allen's thirty-seven-minute collection, the material develops in accordance with a natural and fundamental logic, much like the development of an organism through time. There's an unhurried feel to the material as it moves through its mutating stages, and its generally relaxed drift induces a corresponding sense of calm and thus heightened receptiveness in the listener. |
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