Listening - Wednesday, Nov 20th 2019
- Claude Debussy / Paul Jacobs – Etudes For Piano, Books I & II (1976 Nonesuch)
- Greg Davis – Gather / Scatter (2004 Tonschacht)
- Greg Davis - throughline (2019 Self-released)
Debussy’s Etudes three days straight! (Some days multiple listens)
It’s a great ear & soul cleanser when you’re in the middle of writing something dense and long-winded…
I have two copies of this Greg Davis EP for no good reason – but it’s a nice one full of sharp space and acousmatic shapes. I suppose you could call it a collection of play-sequences: a term (apparantly coined by Guy Reibel) I’m borrowing from Annette Vande Gorne’s Treatise on Writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media and which I think means something along the lines of an intutive story told through the methods of energy-movement, morphology, space and color-spectra.
I really like Davis’ angular shape-music. He seemed much more interested in those sound worlds earlier on in his career, and for a while at least got more focused on space and tone with a number of tone combination and synth ambient type excursions. (Or so it seemed to me – I’ve missed a few of the newer ones & look forward to catching up.) In any case his newest (throughline) seems like a marriage of the two (as long as I’m unfairly dumping everything he’s done into buckets) worlds: angular sound-shapes (mostly) frozen in space and time.