#electroacoustic

Lawrence English · Stephen Vitiello · Chris Abrahams: with Chris (Trinity 2025).

"With Chris" opens Trinity (American Dreams Records, 2025), the third collaborative album by Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello. The record gathers five pieces, each one built around a different guest who takes on the role of third musician (Chris Abrahams (The Necks), Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty, Aki Onda, and the late Steve Roden), hence the titles: "With Chris, " "With Marina, " "With Brendan"… Abrahams, on piano, is the first of them, and at nearly fourteen minutes he also delivers the album's longest piece.

On "With Chris, " Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello raise an architecture of low drones, sustained resonances, and minimal electronic incidents, over which Chris Abrahams lays a piano of extraordinary restraint. His notes, sparse and precise, appear like lunar reflections or incandescent particles suspended above a dark sonic matter. There is something almost pointillist in the way he intervenes: each keystroke holds on to its identity for a few instants, lights up a stretch of the landscape, and slowly fades into its depths.

Rather than unfolding as a conventional composition, the piece is a space that transforms as we inhabit it. At first, the piano seems to order its surroundings, tracing outlines over the low frequencies and the textured electronics; later, that separation begins to dissolve. Abrahams stops occupying the foreground and gradually merges into the electroacoustic fabric, while silence exerts a pressure as decisive as sound itself. The music holds a delicate balance between consonance and dissonance, between fragility and weight, without ever fully resolving in either direction.

From that slow absorption comes the peculiar melancholy of "With Chris": sober, ambiguous, and free of any sentimentality. Each note already carries the intimation of its own disappearance, like a light dimming as it sinks toward the depths. The three musicians end up forming a single breath, a sonic organism in which roles are exchanged and the smallest gestures take on an unexpected intensity.

the use of autotune in this context is certainly unusual (at least as far as im aware) but im not sure it works for me. the rest of its kinda bangin tho and ofc not every vocal track is autotuned so its really just the beginning of the album that grates me

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