(2020) Snow Palms - Land Waves


Review:
Land Waves, Snow Palms‘ third album and first as a duo, wears its influences on its sleeves. Listeners conversant with ambient and classical minimalism will need but a moment to identify the artists whose works left a lasting mark on the project’s founder David Sheppard and Matt Gooderson, a group member since 2017. Both bring deep knowledge of music history to the endeavour, the former both a multi-instrumentalist (State River Widening) and music journalist and Gooderson a musician, producer, and academic who’s head of Popular Music at the University of Westminster when not recording with Sheppard or making solo records of his own. A critical addition to Land Waves is Gooderson’s partner Megan, whose vocalizing further humanizes a sound already warmed by the circumspect wedding of acoustic instrumentation (e.g., mallet instruments and clarinets) to synthesizers and percussion. While names such as Riley and Eno come to mind as the album plays, the group cites Glass’s Music in 12 Parts and Music with Changing Parts and Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Music, and Organ as pivotal reference points. It’s not uncommon for gamelan rhythms and classical minimalism to emerge in the seven tracks, but don’t mistake Snow Palms as a clone: Sheppard and Gooderson use the fertile ground of their precursors as a foundation for their own structures, such a move allowing their material to be seen as a distinctive tributary branching from the main river. Their energized music pulses kinetically as it achieves liftoff, which it does many a time during the forty-three-minute set. Land Waves engages from its first moment when “Atom Dance” interlocks mallet patterns with flute and saxophone counterpoint. High-pitched voice accents and percolating bass pulses expand the dynamic range as the music rises into the air with nothing hindering its flight. Rhythmically, the piece is animated by a quasi-funky African groove, though gamelan and minimalism are also assuredly part of the mix; regardless, propulsion is undeniable and fabulously so. Better yet, rather than riding that wave to one uninterrupted climax, Sheppard and Gooderson pull back halfway through, as if replenishing their resources for the drumming-enhanced crescendo to come. Consistent with its title, “Everything Ascending” starts off earthily with a motorik pulse and honking sax patterns before advancing skyward, the relentlessly chugging movement buoyed by glockenspiel showers and vibrant synths. Reminiscent of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, the material comes at the listener in waves, with patterns artfully advancing and retreating. During its first half, the title track opts for less intense drive, the shift into a serenading presentation not unwelcome. Such panoramic productions impress on many levels, including the skill with which Snow Palms builds and upholds tension across nine- to eleven-minute durations. Other pieces are concise statements, though no less effective for being so. The gamelan dimension moves to the fore for the graceful, vocals-drenched meditation “Evening Rain Gardens”; the lovely closing setting “White Cranes Return,” on the other hand, opts for soothing scene-painting tailor-made for the dimming of day. In speaking about Snow Palms, Gooderson says, “We know we have reached our destination when we become listeners to our own music.” His astute comment alludes to one of the more commendable aspects of the release, the fact that it ultimately pulls you more into the duo’s sound world than redirects you to those of its influencers.





Tracklist:
01 - Atom Dance
02 - Everything Ascending
03 - Evening Rain Gardens
04 - Land Waves
05 - Thought Shadow
06 - Kojo Yakei
07 - White Cranes Return


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, classical, electronic
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits