Mico Nonet: The Cardboard Falcon
Mico Nonet

It's been eighteen years—eighteen!—since Mico Nonet issued its debut album The Marmalade Balloon, and now finally we have The Cardboard Falcon, the Santa Barbara-based group's sumptuous follow-up, available digitally and in a handsome double-vinyl (45 rpm) format. Listening to the two releases back to back suggests that the group's “ambient-chamber” sound hasn't appreciably altered, but that's hardly objectionable when the sound so effectively realized on the debut remains firmly in place on the second.

The instrumentation featured on The Marmalade Balloon—synthesizer, cello, viola, oboe, and French horn—is likewise the same, and the group's personnel is also remarkably intact but for the recent addition of David Cooper, associate principal French horn of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who joins long-standing members Efe Baltacigil (principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony), Carrie Dennis (violist with the Phoenix Symphony), Katherine Needleman (principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra), and Joshua Lee Kramer (credited with synthesizer and guitar and formerly with the rock band Matt Pond Pa). The latter recorded and mixed the album material at a variety of locales, including “churches, homes, and halls.”

The group's Bandcamp page not inaccurately pitches the Mico Nonet sound as “ambient chamber music with vintage synths and principal orchestra members.” To elaborate further, the fourteen settings on The Cardboard Falcon are elegiac chamber reveries that offer meditative spaces for listeners to inhabit for two to five minutes at a time. While each piece features the five players, the arrangements are such that a given musician might be at the forefront of one and be a supporting presence in another. Even this oversimplifies matters, however, when the instruments move fluidly between foreground and background in an ever-evolving contrapuntal design.

Track titles such as “Stringless Kite” and “Elastic Seesaw” invite vivid mental pictures to form as the forty-six minutes of music play. As the opening “Casimir” and later “Squirrel Shaped Shrubbery” illustrate, Kramer's synthesizer functions as an atmospheric element as opposed to dominant soloing one, and as expressions by the acoustic instruments gracefully entwine the electronic element murmurs in the background as a contrasting timbre. During the pastoral “Twigs and Acorns,” Cooper's horn intones sombrely alongside Needleman's resonant woodwind and the string players' painterly shadings. Conventional dramatic arcs of the kind one hears in a traditional composition are eschewed for meditative presentations that favour immersion and stillness over narrative development. Bolstering the music's pastoral character, Needleman augments oboe with oboe d'amore and English horn, and in some pieces Kramer weaves a guitar texture in amongst the other elements to contribute a slightly different kind of connecting thread. While the arrangements are minimal, the material presented is extremely pretty and in its own subtle and artful way emotionally affecting. It's marked by humility too when the participants never grandstand but instead commit themselves to an intimate ensemble presentation.

As sometimes happens when a long gap separates releases, the large backlog of material the group's accumulated in the years since the debut album appeared means that more new material should surface sooner than later; in fact, two more albums are already mixed and ready for release, so with any luck those enraptured by The Cardboard Falcon will be able to experience more of the same once the others become publicly available.

July 2026