Resonant Visions 3
Alan Licht & Loren Connors: Into The Night Sky (2010)
Reviewed format: Digital Album on FAMILY VINEYARD
Welcome once again to the Resonant Visions review series on my blog. Today I’ve got for you this excellent 2010 Digital Album by American guitar improvisers Alan Licht & Loren Connors titled Into The Night Sky. This album was released by FAMILY VINEYARD. In the cover artwork for this album I immediately got drawn to the big thin pinkish circle on the stark black background. The circle is open, pointing at a probable kind of “open cycle” in the music on this release but also abstracting the concept of the night to a single minimal shape lighting up the darkness. It’s definitely a great Album cover that in an abstract manner matches the music contained on this album and grabs the attention without spoiling the atmosphere and style of the music too much. Unfortunately I couldn’t find artwork credits in the description on Bandcamp, but regardless a fine stand out album cover. In the download of Into The Night Sky you can find this album cover in good resolution as well as the two album tracks in 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality.
Onto the music on Into The Sky Now and the connection I found between the cover artwork and the two album tracks. Into The Night Sky features two improvised live performances recorded in 1996 (Map of Dusk) and 2006 (Into The Night Sky). These live recordings find the two guitarists performing in wonderfully blending, inventive and genuinely immersive guitar melodies, ambiences and experimentation. Map of Dusk starts off the album. Right from the beginning it’s obvious that Alan Licht & Loren Connors found a great way to divide “roles” in their performances, with one guitarist handling the main lead and the second guitar creating both accompanying chords or handling an experimental, sometimes noisy background of guitar feedback, effects or string noises. The lead melodies are oftentimes quite melancholic and light, feeling like a musical interpretation of soft orange light shining in the darkness of the quiet night. The bluesy twists add some mild sadness to the ambience of the melodies. Indeed more than just musical instruments Alan Licht & Loren Connors are really feeling the tones, melodies, textures they are creating, shaping them to sometimes blend into eachother like a gentle cloud of warmth covering the listener but they are also not afraid to at times create intriguing contrast between eachothers musical elements, with juxtapositions of abstract (atonal) structures of tones going with the warm lead melody or letting a wave of resonant feedback almost cover the other guitarist’s tones. The music is often moving at a calm slow pace, like putting a magnifying glass on the melodies, even the core elements making up the guitar’s sound and fluctuating, manipulating these to shape constantly evolving new directions the melancholic guitar melodies flow into. In a way it’s like describing a long walk in the night, quiet contemplation, thoughts shifiting from good memories to bad memories (the harsher parts in the piece at times almost shifting towards heavily distorted Noise). The balance between “exploration” and balance in the performance also enhances the immersive introspective element of the music which is never quite the same and allows the listener to have his / her own interpretation of the meaning / feeling these tones / ambiences / noise conjur up. A wonderful performance. On Into The Night Sky Alan Licht & Loren Connors create an atmosphere that again has that subdued “night” vibe but with a much more mysterious sounding shimmer around it. Both guitarists are now playing in more blending metallic kind of tones, with wah wah and delay effects being used to create deep distant abstract clicking resonant guitar tones that accompany the often haunting guitar chords. The tonal and textural manipulation of the guitar sounds is also brought more to the foreground in this piece with sections of the perfomance sounding like clouds or even rivers of strange silvery glimmering almost alien sounding guitar string sounds that gave me a feeling of wandering around in the night while ghostly washes of subdued light appear around me. Into The Night Sky mixes its melodic elements with elements of textural experimentation that made me think of Sound Art and indeed both pieces on this album have both a strong musicality but also feeling for the actual textures and manipulation of these into environments, situations, shapes maybe even a kind of personality that really draws the listener inside the music like combinations of two organic mysterious beings creating the music from their state of being.
So all in all Alan Licht & Loren Connors have created some excellent sonic explorations here through there performances and also have such interplay between eachother, evolving the performances over time in such smooth almost composed manners that it’ll most likely leave you wanting to listen to more work from these two excellent artist when the album is finished. I’d definitely recommend this album to fans of Free Improvisation looking for more ambient, subdued performed music but that is also varied and sprinkled with bursts of Noise and feedback elements. But also if you’re interested in what it sounds like when two musician’s are so tuned into eachother performances and sonic manipulations that their music becomes a combined whole, a new entity created through improvisation go check out this album.
Digital Album is available from the FAMILY VINEYARD Bandcamp page here: https://familyvineyard.bandcamp.com/album/into-the-night-sky
