|
PREORDER
Ships When IN STOCK.
|
ARTIST
TITLE
Well Up
FORMAT
LP
LABEL
CATALOG #
FTR 781LP
FTR 781LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
5/30/2025
|
"Liz Durette returns with a gorgeous fourth LP (her third for Feeding Tube) and not a moment too soon! With Well Up, Liz delivers a bright and sparkling sonic gem to illuminate our days and nights. Liz is an artist, keyboardist, improviser, and deep thinker based in Massachusetts, after many years in Baltimore. She has created an uncanny body of musical work of keyboard improvisations. Her style strikes me as utterly unique, and this latest album offers an entirely new example of her vision. While her earlier records were often shifting, madcap melodic constructions, Well Up offers another side, in a rich and distilled scope. Here, Liz generates a lush and enchanting sound world of morphing, cycling melodic phrases which gently swirl and pool into three great lakes of beauty. Liz improvised this music on a Midi Polyphonic Expressive keyboard, but the album can't be characterized as a 'synth,' 'ambient' or 'minimal' release. Her employment of multiple voicings of pre-modern sounds like flutes and reeds create a singular headspace that defies easy description. 'Heart' begins the album with serene, mysterious melody that unfolds in elastic and expressive motivic gestures. All of the three songs are built on phrases of simple melodic variation that spiral out of simplicity, slowly and steadily, with subtle layers of increasing ornamentation. The touch sensitivity of Liz's instrument with its parameters of ultra bendy notes spill phrases across the soundstage in delightful patterns. It's a beguiling stew. The second piece, 'Lake' was born from Liz's complete mis-remembering of a Lebanese folk song which transformed itself into this special and hypnotic reverie. I can picture a court of dazzling beings promenading in a splendid choreography as I listen to this track with my eyes closed. You may capture something equally grand in your mind's eye while listening, it's ultra visual music. Side two offers us the side-long opus of 'Naga.' It gradually unfurls and billows into a vast and deep pool of sound that I don't light heartedly describe as cosmic. I can imagine this piece playing on for eternity like some gyroscopic, perpetual motion machine that generates the world's dreamiest tones. The album is another rare example of music that generates a strange emotional response (at least for me), operating in a special region that exists somewhere at the border of joy and sorrow. I can't conjure a word or phrase in English that captures it accurately but I'm sure you'll know it when you hear it. The sounds surely live up to Liz's brilliant and peculiar cover art featuring an exquisitely manicured hand threatening to insert a deep blue push pin into a blazing pink balloon. While Liz has openly expressed having derived inspiration from improvisation and ornamentation across a variety of eastern and western traditions, this work seems to me to be pure Durette. Calm, soothing, novel, exotic, luminous and expansive -- much more could be said or written about this album but the wonderful sounds do a fabulous job of speaking for themselves. Please let them speak to you." --Rob Thomas, 2025
|
|
|