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All Histories opens as gently as a Bill Evans ballad on piano, awash in the live textures of a room. Christopher Walker’s voice and a hushed rumble of clarinets give way to a sparse crash of beats on “Monochrome.” Each of the five songs on the debut from Other People’s Energy is a new little world, lush and clean, with deep electronic grooves pressing live drums and woodwinds.
The free-jazz dabbling, minimalist sensibilities, and devotion to sensitive production for which Skyler Hill and Walker are known inform the record, essentially a step-out for two experimental composers into high-toned pop music. Somehow the results are both direct and mysterious — a feat often ventured and seldom achieved in post-fusion arenas and electroacoustic collage-making.
Fans of James Blake and Arvo Pärt will recognize elements of both in Other People’s Energy and wonder at the cohesive blend. The answer is a reverence for musique concrète traditions and the ambient potential of jazz.
On All Histories live clarinets chatter and pause. Then they nestle into pulses of blown-out synth. The album builds an expectation that a shift is on its way when these parts agree. Newly intent, the listener learns to relish the momentary entwining of the acoustic and the electronic, which remain forces unto themselves even in colliding.
// Lyndsay Knecht
The free-jazz dabbling, minimalist sensibilities, and devotion to sensitive production for which Skyler Hill and Walker are known inform the record, essentially a step-out for two experimental composers into high-toned pop music. Somehow the results are both direct and mysterious — a feat often ventured and seldom achieved in post-fusion arenas and electroacoustic collage-making.
Fans of James Blake and Arvo Pärt will recognize elements of both in Other People’s Energy and wonder at the cohesive blend. The answer is a reverence for musique concrète traditions and the ambient potential of jazz.
On All Histories live clarinets chatter and pause. Then they nestle into pulses of blown-out synth. The album builds an expectation that a shift is on its way when these parts agree. Newly intent, the listener learns to relish the momentary entwining of the acoustic and the electronic, which remain forces unto themselves even in colliding.
// Lyndsay Knecht
