Alio Die & Lorenzo Montanà: The Threshold of Beauty
Projekt

Sam Rosenthal with Nick Shadow and Steve Roach: The Gesture of History
Projekt

Sam Rosenthal, who issues gothic-ambient-electronic material under the Black Tape For A Blue Girl alias when not overseeing Projekt operations, receives the primary credit of the three artists involved in The Gesture of History, which makes sense given how it came into being. The album grew out of an instrumental Rosenthal had created for his solo project featuring processed and sequenced viola by Portland-based Nick Shadow. That track, titled “Blood on the Snow,” was soon joined by another iteration, this one similar in mood and texture and featuring Shadow playing live over the material, and then an even longer piece, “The Gesture of History,” featuring sixteen minutes of viola, harmonium, and synthesizer. It dawned on Rosenthal that he had the makings of a great full-length on his hands, yet sensing that more could be done with the material asked longtime associate Steve Roach to add spatial enhancements and synth textures. Having received the newly enhanced files back from Roach, Rosenthal then added finishing touches of his own by restructuring and extending the pieces.

Yet as key to the release's creation as Rosenthal clearly was, it's Shadow's contributions that are largely responsible for the music's impact. As the lead instrument, his viola playing dominates the sound field, his organic strings swelling gloriously into a multi-layered forcefield as a reverberating foundation rumbles below. In the opening piece, gauzy synth tones and washes provide an effective counterpoint to the viola, with the interactions between the elements combining to create an engulfing mass of extraordinary beauty. The overriding tone of this electroacoustic material is mournful, supplicating even, and while an introspective dimension is definitely present, the music builds to epic, electronics-enhanced pitches, too: the swirl generated by the three towards the end of “Blood on the Snow I,” for example, has as much in common with shoegaze as ambient. “Blood on the Snow II” immediately distinguishes itself from the first version by opening with Shadow alone, his keening viola multiplied into a small string section and the music's mood plangent in the extreme. The outpouring of Shadow's expressions are even more affecting here than they are in the opening treatment.

While the material flows fluidly from its first to fourth tracks, there are a few production-related changes between the halves, with the composing credit for the opening pair shared by all three participants but the last two credited to Rosenthal alone. Instrumentally, however, there's only a modest difference between the halves, Roach not credited with synths on the closing pair and Rosenthal adding harmonium to the electronics and processing he's credited with throughout. To inaugurate the album's second half, “... And Watch the Galaxy Turning” pairs Shadow's sustained bowing with a suspended electronic drone for four ambient-dronescaping minutes, after which the titular meditation advances slowly, its sixteen minutes used to maximum effect in the deliberation with which Shadow's bowed lines unfurl and the sustaining of the material's dolorous mood expertly handled. Here, perhaps even more than elsewhere, it's the viola that's at the forefront and magnificently so.

Compared to The Gesture of History, the second collaborative effort by Alio Die and Lorenzo Montanà on Projekt adheres a little more closely to ambient-electronic soundscaping convention. Arriving four years after Holographic Codex, The Threshold of Beauty blends Die's zither, sitar, psaltery, and field recordings with Montanà's piano and electronics on six meditative ambient settings. The recording project began with the latter augmenting Die's psaltery string plucks with real-time electronic treatments and processing, after which Die applied editing to the results and completed the process with additional effects and loops.

Timbre and sonority are critical to the music's effect, with the exotic shimmer of the psaltery lending the material a mystical quality that points it in a New Age direction; further to that, bell tinklings and enveloping synthetic textures deepen its meditative character, while wordless vocalizations by Die bring out a choral dimension. By titling one piece “Dark Dhrupad” and thereby alluding to the ancient tradition of Hindustani classical music, the collaborators also acknowledge the influence of Indian culture on this East-meets-West project. Said details suggest music of determinedly peaceful character that's tailor-made for contemplation, yet while that's true, moments of turbulence also surface during the recording's hour-long presentation. An overall sense of calm is more pervasive, however, which makes The Threshold of Beauty a non-chemical means by which to achieve if not nirvana then at least serenity.

Representative of the recording are “The Closest Place to the Soul,” which, with the pluck and strum of Die's string instruments draped across its droning foundation, thrums like some primordial entity, and the oceanic meditation “On the Waves of Fate - Part 2,” a seventeen-minute bookend to its shorter counterpart. The album's largely homogeneous in tone, but the two do spring a surprise or two on the listener, the inclusion of what sounds like saxophone on “Vacant Lights Disclose the Shadows” a memorable illustration. The press release pitches the recording as “a transcendental vision of beauty as an integral part of the cosmos,” but don't let that grandiose claim put you off. The Threshold of Beauty is a thoroughly accessible exercise in ambient soundscaping design that can be experienced on purely sonic grounds or with however much cosmological meaning you care to affix to it.

July 2019