(2021) Craig Padilla & Marvin Allen - Strange Gravity


Review:
With Strange Gravity, electronic-ambient artist Craig Padilla and electric guitarist Marvin Allen reunite for a sequel to their 2019 collaboration Toward The Horizon. While each brings a dramatically different background to the endeavour, their artistic talents gel on the sixty-five-minute recording, said differences working to their advantage. There are times when the music appears to gravitate in the direction of one creator’s style, but when it does the effect is never jarring; on the contrary, it simply amplifies the breadth of stylistic ground encompassed when two such personalities work together. In addition to guitars, Allen’s credited with home-made theremin on the release, while Padilla contributes synthesizers, sequencers, and drum programming. The title track inaugurates the release with hymnal steel guitar-like chords, with the nineteen-minute excursion mirrored at album’s end by a setting of similar proportions. The blend of Padilla’s subtle synthesizer textures and Allen’s delicate guitar sets a promising scene for both “Strange Gravity” as a track and the album in general. That restrained intro gradually gives way to trippy atmospherics and a softly burbling sequencer pattern as the material advances patiently through a series of connecting episodes. At one moment, eruptive whooshes and pitch-bent swirls add a woozy, psychedelic character before calm reinstates itself and the tone grows laden with mystery. At album’s end, “All Around Us” brings Strange Gravity to a peaceful resolution with an enveloping, gently swirling meditation whose closing minutes evoke in their soothing tone the opening piece. “Fractured Illuminations” is dedicated to Robin Trower and consistent with that features no small amount of axe smolder. Punctuated with choir-like voices and percolating patterns, “The Revelation” morphs from a peaceful guitar meditation into a pulsing exercise in rock guitar stratospherics. Pulling back from such aggressiveness, “Friendship” could even be called tender when Allen’s tremulous, at times bluesy voicings are so lyrical. When his guitar wails against a backdrop of synthesizer percolations, the effect’s a tad reminiscent of Edgar Froese doing something similar during a trippy Tangerine Dream track. There are also moments—during “Friendship,” for example—where the combination of ambient synthesizer and electric guitar invites comparison to Jonas Munk’s Manual—never a bad thing. The press release refers to the music as “space rock,” which, even if reductive, is certainly one way of describing it. In the longer tracks especially, the impression created is of panoramic landscapes slowly taken in as their horizons are scanned by the viewer; by contrast, the shorter pieces are less soundscapes than extended instrumental songs marked by strong melodic figures. The cover imagery depicts physical reality splitting into separate realms, a disorienting visual treatment that recalls similar reality-warping sequences in the film Inception. If the concept is metaphorically intended to suggest two drastically different artistic sensibilities at cross-purposes, the music itself exemplifies no such incompatibility.





Tracklist:
01 - Strange Gravity
02 - The Revelation
03 - Friendship
04 - Fractured Illuminations
05 - All Around Us


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
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