She is a Phantom

Today, I bought Harold Budd's album "She is a Phantom" and already I can feel the creative panther stirring inside me. It's so evocative, and I've only just begun to walk through the trail of seconds and minutes that Budd has wound up like a garden path at midnight.

I have a feeling there's going to be an update to this post in the next few hours.

Quiet City - Pan American

If you picture this album exactly as it is titled, then you're mostly on the right track. Like a city, this album takes different neighborhoods of structured musical places and lays them out like geography.

In context of the city, Track 04 - Inside Elevation would be a suburb overtaken by marshlands and swamp. A rhythmic hum guides you through the 5:07 minutes of this song like a wooden walkway, denoted by the sage-like guitar accompaniment. This song takes some extra consideration, though, when it is overtaken by static and feedback something like halfway through the song, but is yet a pleasure to be heard.

If our imaginative metropolis were a city by the sea, Track 07 - Het Volk would be a lonely sloop, lost in the still bay on an eerie night. Moreover, the captain might be a character like Jonah, engaged in a steep spiritual or psychological crisis to the sound of melodic beeps and boops.

When listening to Track 05 - Skylight, i can't help but think of professional practice buildings, in which places there is always an enforced sense of silence to the deserted, elegant hallways. I imagine the setting of this song to be an eternal confinement in one of these ghostly buildings, doomed to an existence of repeating the same corridors with the natural light of a summer's noon-day pouring through the windows and the skylights.

All in all, a very diverse settlement of sound, from these three songs alone. Together, they're like eight colonies of pop and dub in a new world of ambience and ease. Make the pilgrimage! Your mind is the only Mayflower you need for Pan American's "Quiet City"

Periphery - Christopher Bissonnette

Before the second of September (the date I purchased this album off of iTunes) I had never heard of Christopher Bissonnette before. I found this album in the Suggested For You area while i was looking through relevant music, but after sampling a few tracks on Youtube and iTunes alike, i realized i had to have this album.

I seek uniformity in the albums i choose to buy - a unified idea, sound, or place in which the music resides - and this album has it. Living in the suburbs of Seattle, wedged between two great lakes and the Puget Sound, there's a lot of water, a lot of nature, and a lot of great bike paths which wind their way around grand highway overpasses, through wetland gardens of algae and bullrushes - and don't forget the rain. This album feels very local, as i'm zipping past the sprawling metropolis. On my bike, i am disconnected from the chaos of the highways, residing on paths that feel very much like the road less traveled - an outsider, who is there in spirit, but not in participation with that mad, noisy bustle. There i dwell, on a footpath skybridge that arcs over the cityscapes and roadways.

To me, this is the nature of Christopher Bissonnette's album "Periphery". Filled with a definite atmosphere of vague tension, countered by high reliefs and accented by various connotations of intelligence. So far, my favorite track has been 01 - In Accordance. The piano keys which open this song are like the first recurring thoughts that you've achieved a certain level of Paradise. The rest of the album builds off of this like a conversation, or a column of ecstatic-sedated realizations.

If you, or someone you know is the ghostly kind who likes visiting lonely, urban places for meditation, then this album comes highly recommended.