Recesses
Lee Weisert
New Focus Recordings FCR366 (newfocusrecordings.com)
Listen
Recesses I: Part 1 - Listen on YouTube
Recesses I: Part 2 - Listen on YouTube
Recesses II - Listen on YouTube
Read the Review
The album Recesses is a fantastical sonic journey of melting ice, acoustic piano, degraded tape and voices, a kind of hustle and bustle mixed with water droplets and electronic fuzz. Layers of time, stratus clouds shifting, streaks of water moving through air, frost on metal, children speaking. Colours of purple, grey and green. Sparkle and dust. Layer under layer under layer. Windows open and close, breezes blow through, curtains move. Empty walls fill up with images and empty out again. Conversations rise and fall. This album is a masterful creation, a demonstration of visually listening peripherally with a third eye, of noticing and letting go.
Never feeling preachy or heavy, these four beautiful tracks morph between mindful and wild, a flowing sonic movement that feels unrushed but is never still. This is a magical space to enter without the wastefulness of extraneous noise or volume. The fourth track, Similar Speeds, is a rather mesmerizing visualization of subtle stretching of mis-timing, reminiscent of the metal ball toy Newton’s Cradle.
Professor of composition at Northwestern University, DMA pianist and multi-instrumentalist Lee Weisert has collected a brilliant team of collaborators to build his journey with. Allen Anderson on modular synth, Nicholas DiEugenio, violin, Jonathon Kirk, electronics and Melissa Martin, vocals. This is an album to listen to while doing nothing else.
