(2021) Portico Quartet - Terrain


Review:
When Duncan Bellamy and Jack Wyllie – the driving force behind Portico Quartet got together in their East London studio in May 2020 and started work on the music that would become their new album, the world, or most of it, was in the midst of the first lockdown. The unique impact of the events of 2020 became the backdrop to their time composing and recording; causing them to take stock, re-think, and plot a new musical path. Indian novelist Arundhati Roy expressed the sense of grief and rupture from the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”, and as they created the music that would become Terrain they were drawn towards longer, slowly unfolding pieces, which are perhaps the most artistically free and also the most beautiful they have ever made. One can hear echoes of Steven Reich in Terrain as clearly as they can hear traces of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Midori Takada, the latter of which made a big impression on Wyllie with her 1983 album Through the Looking Glass. No matter what angle you approach it, Terrain is a spellbinding amalgamation of colorful sounds. If there is one thing in the Portico Quartet’s instrumentation to set them apart from their peers, it’s the use of the hang drum. Looking like a puffed-up cymbal and sounding like a steel drum with a softer attack, the group build unique ostinatos normally provided by keys. The hang drum pattern that gets the first movement started behaves true to minimalist form with a simple four-note pattern that alters only slightly over the first half of the movement. The entrance of the saxophone is just another textural component alongside the soft drumming and electronic sampling. Just when the listener feels that the first movement has gone to sleep for good, in comes a simple yet evocative piano that sounds like it needed a tune-up a few years ago. The hang drum reappears as it did before, wrapping up the 19 minutes of quietly tense music with long-sustaining minor chords. The somber nature of the first movement is swapped for a lighter sound and tempo for the second movement, the shortest one at nine minutes and 16 seconds. A simple piano figure, possibly simpler than the hang drum figure of the first movement, guides much of the movement as low strings provide elongated pedal tones as a foundation. Bells, light percussion, and a hesitant saxophone fill out the surrounding space without cluttering it. The hang drum returns for the third and final movement, perhaps the most abstract one of all. All of the instruments come out to play, but it’s the drumming that pushes everything forward. Any repeated patterns are tucked back in the mix as the movement morphs into something resembling a drum solo accompanied by the discordant hum of electronic ambience and what sounds like a soprano sax. At ten minutes in length, it almost doesn’t give itself enough room for falling action once all the pieces have smashed together. Terrain may not be a unique album in the perspective of contemporary jazz or minimalist electronic and classical music, but it certainly is unique unto the Portico Quartet. Bellamy and Wyllie have used their lockdown time well in exploring the outer capabilities of their chosen format. It’s an album where grand ambitions and warm sounds meet at an opportune intersection where texture ultimately overrules genre. Can you ask for more from a suite of music that combines ambient, minimalist classical, and jazz?





Track Listing:
01 - Terrain- I (19:19)
02 - Terrain- II (09:17)
03 - Terrain- III (10:10)


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, jazz
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