#david lackney

[dustedmagazine]

Ezra Feinberg — Soft Power (Tonal Rail)

Ezra Feinberg builds intricate architectures from the softest, most organic sounds, achieving a pointillist, Reichian complexity out of guitar, synth, voice and piano notes that melt in the atmosphere. It’s a puzzle box made of clouds, light as air, with the sun shining through. The one-time Citay impresario assembles experimental musicians from all over to infuse his compositions with life. John Thayer of Sunwatchers and Arp is, perhaps, his closest, most regular collaborator, but he also brings in Jeffrey Cantu-Lesdesma, David Moore and Mary Lattimore to play various parts in these luminous cuts.

“Pose Beams,” for example, augments its lattice-like sound with the gentle piping of moduler synthesizer — that’s Cantu-Ledesma. Its flute-y sounds intersect gently, but at right angles, with piano and guitar. The piece interleaves motifs in a round-like overlayering, a bell-like tone picking out the top line of melody. A bit of drumming comes in later, as the sounds sprawl in all directions, no longer so orderly but infused with improvisatory enterprise.

The New York City improviser David Lackney turns up in two separate songs. “Future Sound,” which opens the disc, establishes a serene, pastoral atmosphere, as silky flute rests lightly on undulations of picked guitar. Lackney plays piano later in “The Big Clock,” a tune that starts in clean, pulsing electronics, then kicks them up a notch with effected vocals, just dots of denatured sound, making patterns in a matrix. Mid-cut a buoyant, emphatic beat swaggers in, very Stereolab-ish in its fizzy, euphoric propulsion.  These cuts lilt upwards optimistically, not a shiver of doubt or downcast-ness in their bright melodies.

The harp, as played by Mary Lattimore in “Get Some Rest,” seems like a natural addition to these abstracted compositions, its pizzicato tones precise as a machine but also human as breathing. The track circles tightly around short, repeated motifs, and yet seems to find an expansiveness in this reiteration, a hall of mirrors quality in which basic ideas are reflected and refracted to the point they suggest infinity.  

The cover to Soft Power shows a bit of greenery hemmed in by concrete, and indeed, sprouts of organic life flourish here in the space they’re given. Instrumental sounds proliferate amid a tightly structured discipline, sounding lush and abstracted at once.

Jennifer Kelly