As a contemporary dance term, "body isolations" refers to the manner in which an audience is brought to concentrate its full attention on a single element of the
performance. Following this principle, Donato Wharton sets out to arrange this album in such a way that each composition manifests a sole sentiment
most acutely.
While he does sometimes achieve this, there remains a continuity
between pieces, a sameness in mood, pace and arrangement; it leaves the
impression that these individual works are merely tiny scatterings of a sole
shaft of
light refracted through a prism.
By and large, tracks are hushed and slightly dour. A gray cloud of fizzling ambiance wavers atop "Blue Skied Demon,"
punctured by gaunt guitar lattices and ripples of static. "Transparencies"
hints at this very same nostalgia, its watery loops of piano and subtle digital scratches testifying to some unknown missing contents.
With "Underweave," the forms become a bit more mangled, a bit more
aggressive and to the point, but they still lead back to the same sentiment
of reverence and dismay before some unknown, yet seemingly important absence.
After the dense buildup of steely
timbres and luminous organ chords, though, "Puget Sound" follows with slow swirling
pools of organ and electric piano, shaded by fuzzy electronic tones, and slips
back into a gauze of sublime nostalgia. Near the end of the work, an odd bluesy
slide of guitar is blended against skeletal bell-like tones and ectoplasmic smears
of sound, but this comes along too late to really tear the album away from pretty
spiraling.
Much of this album is indeed pretty, and it could well sit amiably alongside
any number of other ambient electronica acts (Marsen Jules and Yellow 6 come to mind). But prettiness aside, it's rarely anything more than the empty foam on the sea. More importantly, rather than achieving a flow of each track from its own internal episodic logic, Wharton is mostly content to repeat a limited number of basic themes. |
