Coastal Traces

Eleanor Hovda

Hovda- composer, grand piano innards

Jack Vees- elec. bass, 12-string gtr., elec. gtr., waterphone

Libby Van Cleve- oboe, English horn, oboe d’amore, shenai

Real goods here, folks. “Coastal Traces Tidepools” for grand piano insides and waterphone, in its crystalline strangeness, makes me think of what fractals might sound like if they were physical and danced. “Glacier Track” raises sand deserts, not ice deserts. Van Cleve’s oboe d’amore sounds an elegy for a lost tribal elder with its echoes of Middle Eastern sonorities. It’s a stunner. Van Cleve uses the screaming potentials of the shenai to scary effect on “Shenai Sky” and “Beginnings.” Throughout the record the categories “composed” and “improvised” are thoroughly blurred. The musicians offer droning, keening, frayed but rich music throughout and the result is the stuff of depth, substrata and eternity, even. It’s an involving, deep-listening excursion into the night side of reality.

OO Discs 0029

Richard Grooms