In the digitally oriented, singles-driven music market of the late aughts, album format releases -- much less ones composed of side-length drone pieces containing no rhythms and only subtle gradients of harmonic development -- suggest a commercial viability on par with ailing carmakers and collapsing financial institutions. All the more surprising, then, that minimalist composers of the sustained tone school such as
Keith Fullerton Whitman,
Gregg Kowalsky, and
Christopher Bissonnette, all seem to be enjoying somewhat of a renaissance at this time -- if not commercially, at least artistically. Burlington, VT-based composer
Greg Davis, like his semi-academic, experimentalist brethren, favors generating acoustic and electro-acoustic textures to digitally process, filter, and manipulate far beyond their resemblance to the instrument of origin.
Mutually Arising,
Davis' second full-length for Chicago-based post-rock peddlers Kranky, puts a definitively 21st century stamp on '60s-era experimental touchstones, from the pure overtone minimalism of
LaMonte Young to the consciousness-expanding "deep listening" of
Pauline Oliveros. The album consists of two 20-plus-minute tracks or, more appropriately, extended meditations, each forming a glacial arc of near-imperceptible harmonic shifts. "Cosmic Mudra" builds and crests from a particularly massaging mid-register synth drone, adding layers of tone coloration and eventually taking on the aggressive characteristics of an overdriven church organ. The disc's second half, "Hall of Pure Bliss," begins with a gorgeous, swirling synth pad that recalls
Eno and
Fripp's "Heavenly Music Corporation" and pretty much stays there as if arrested by its own pastoral beauty. As the track's final decaying embers of tone close out to a pleasingly warm afterglow, the listener, too, will be entranced by
Mutually Arising's wonderfully sublime retreat from the modern world. ~ Dave Shim