(2021) Arian Shafiee - Pastorale


Review:
Arian Shafiee first came to prominence as the guitarist for Guerrilla Toss, a smart but antic dance punk outfit that shoehorned jazz, trance, funk and jamming into the smallest possible sonic space. He has since turned to more experimental work, as in the guitar-centric Scarlet Fail from 2018, where he tilted folk-picked meditations in unexpected directions by incorporating middle eastern tunings and sonorities. He seems to be in the process of cutting back to essentials, and this latest album is yet again more spacious and calm. Working with minimalist drone artists including claire rousay, Chuck Johnson and John C. Jones, he drifts free of obvious melody or meter, wafting long, indefinite sustained tones over one another and giving them time to bloom. Rousay’s piece, characteristically, incorporates sounds that are not traditionally considered music, some rattling, shuffling, clicking elements that infuse “California Pastorale”’s limpid surges of sound with a bit of tension and pace. Even so, this track progresses like a breathing animal, the sound swelling and receding in a regular way, so that you can almost imagine the rise and fall of a furry chest. “Luscher Cascades,” with Chuck Johnson, is likewise radiantly still, employing the silvery, disembodied steel guitar sounds that made Cinder Grove such a listening oasis. Here, too, more frictive sounds are layered into tranquility, some scrapings, some distant horn-like blasts, the hiss and twitch of static. And yet, they melt into the overall atmosphere of calm like rain falling into the ocean, losing their form as they slip into a universal hum. In most of these tracks, it’s not easy to connect the sounds you hear with the instruments making them, but “Public Life,” near the midway point makes evocative use of piano. Simple patterns of keyboard notes are heard through a hushed, echoey space, as line of static rattles on at the baseline and big swooshes of cyber-altered sound come in at intervals from the sidelines. It has the effect of distancing the recognizable piano sounds, so that it’s a piano you dreamed or a piano you remember rather than the instrument itself. There’s an unearthly melancholy to it. Not much happens across these seven tracks, in the sense of melodic development or narrative, and yet they demand attention. There is a quiet beautiful place in them, that you can enter but not really understand, and while elements of the ordinary creep in at the edges, this is not the world you live in. — dusted





Track Listing:
1.Luscher Cascades (feat. Chuck Johnson) 04:56
2.California Pastorale (feat. Claire Rousay) 05:14
3.Hard Pass (feat. John Calvin Jones) 08:18
4.Wembley 05:19
5.Public Life 02:44
6.Victorian Timestamp (feat. Joanna Mattrey) 04:30
7.Midday (feat. Gabrielle Herbst) 04:38


Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Country: USA
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