Artist : Alexander Turnquist
Album : Hallway Of Mirrors
Year : 2011
Genre : Instrumental
Quality : 241kbps / 44.1KHz / Joint Stereo
Source : CD
Playtime : 0h 34m
Size : 64.82mb
Label : VHF
Catalognr : vhf#126
Tracklist:
01. Running Towards 2:42
02. Hallway Of Mirrors 6:05
03. Spherical Aberrations 8:09
04. Waiting At The Departure Gate 16:24
05. Running From 1:15
Releasenotes:
Both a consolidation and refinement of the advances achieved on 2009's As the
Twilight Crane Dreams in Color, Alexander Turnquist's fourth album, Hallway Of
Mirrors, once again documents two complementary sides of the young
(twenty-three-years as of this writing) New York-based artist: his prowess as a
musician, with his primary instrument the twelve-string acoustic guitar, and as
a composer capable of distilling a distinctive and personalized vision into
physical form. Like its predecessor, the new release augments Turnquist's dense
flurries of finger-picking with piano, vibraphone (played with both mallets and
bow), and violin, the latter two courtesy of guests Matthew O'Koren and Slow Six
leader Christopher Tignor; Turnquist also, as he did on the earlier album, uses
that augmented instrumentation as primary voices for the composition's themes.
A major part of the album's appeal is its structure, with Turnquist framing
three inner pieces with two shorter solo guitar settings, ôRunning Towardsö and
ôRunning From,ö that not only establish the album's resonant tone but provide a
satisfying contrast to the more expansively arranged settings, an effect first
heard, for example, when the bright sparkle of the acoustic picking in ôRunning
Towardsö transitions into a lush flourish that starts the title track on its
way. The music's instrumental design expands as the album progresses, with the
single guitar of the first piece eventually blossoming into the full ensemble of
guitar, piano, vibraphone, and violin introduced on ôSpherical Aberrationsö and
culminating in the album's centerpiece, the sixteen-minute epic ôWaiting At The
Departure Gate,ö before exiting via the brief ôRunning From.ö The haunting
ôSpherical Aberrations,ö a ravishing wall-of-sound of guitar-based rhythmic
insistence and uplifting motifs, sets the stage for the even more ambitious
ôWaiting At The Departure Gate,ö which uses Turnquist's acoustic curlicues as a
propellant that pulls the other instruments along in its wake. In this case,
melancholy thematic material, voiced by violin and augmented by vibraphone,
soars over a feverishly insistent base, with the instruments' forward motion
intermittently arrested by guitar-based interludes of reflective character.
In terms of sequence, each of the first four tracks is longer than the one
preceding it, a move that mimics the movement within a classic narrative
trajectory (i.e., the album's climax,ôWaiting At The Departure Gate,ö is
followed by the rapid dΘnouement of ôRunning Fromö). There's a grandiose
dimension to the material, an impression reinforced by the generous degree of
sustain and reverb with which Turnquist's wholly acoustic material is presented,
and there's no flab to speak of either, as Hallway Of Mirrors weighs in at a
svelte thirty-five minutes without ever feeling like it's slighted by such
brevity. This is, in short, another bravura outing from Turnquist that is, in
its own unassuming way, a triumph.
Textura.org
http://alexanderturnquist.bandcamp.com/