Complete 10-Inch Series From Cold Blue
Various Artists
Cold Blue is a label started in the 80s, revived in the 90s and still percolating today. They’ve featured West Coast composers and have pioneered post-minimalist, ambient and process music. Much of the music on the label can be seen as a reaction against 70s-80s East Coast compositional over-complexity, atonalism and over-seriousness. For me at least, this is a blessing for my ears. This set is a re-release of the 10-inch vinyl records the label put out in the early 80’s.
Peter Garland’s “Matachin Dances” sway back and forth like medieval troubadour dance music that’s only barely found its way into the twentieth century. Barely, but unmistakably. Their historic depth partly comes from the fact that they’re inspired by Mexican matachine folk dance music which date back as much as 470 years ago. They are refreshing and engaging.
Michael Jon Fink’s piano pieces are minimalist in the sense that everything’s pared down to only the barest of dramatic essentials. They almost fade into nothingness but make their presence known with the subtlest means of impact, the way a Zen patriarch might make a hand gesture.
Barney Childs’ “Clay Music” is the highlight of the set. His piece gives structure to a group of players apparently improvising (at least it sounds like improvising) with Susan Rawcliffe’s personally-designed collection of flutes, whistles and ocarinas. Traditional Andean wind music made contemporary might describe this. Rawcliffe’s unique designs open up possibilities as they have on her other albums, and Childs’ framework brings a new type of clarity to the sounds they can make in the right hands, and they’re in the right hands here. It’s vividly present and yet somehow mysterious.
Chas Smith’s pieces for pedal steel guitar and 12-string dobro so transform those instruments that they’re mostly unrecognizable. The twang of the pedal steel is distilled down into a wide open spaces ambient prairie sound. “Scicura” offers gentle, web-like sound linkages which are arrestingly beguiling.
Rick Cox on prepared guitar and Marty Walker on clarinet illustrate two Cox compositions of not-quite-ambient music that make for a comforting weirdness. If I hadn’t seen the mention of prepared guitar in the notes, I wouldn’t have believed it. Caressing sounds come out of his axe, but they’re smudged in a forlornly gorgeous way. I can’t really tell that it’s a clarinet most of the time, either, but it’s similarly beautiful and Walker dovetails well with Cox.
Daniel Lentz’s crystalline steady-state works wrap up this set. A reproduction of the cover of the original 10-inch is in the booklet and shows a crescent moon shape within a silhouette of the sun’s surface flames. The crescent is suggestive of a smile but only suggestive. And the sun burns on. These images illustrate Lent’s music, with its deceptive brightness and spiraling steadiness. He only sounds too pretty if you’re not paying close attention.
CB 0014
Richard Grooms