Patricia Brennan’s first album as a leader, Maquishti, is a set of twelve compositions and improvisations for Brennan’s own marimba and vibraphone, the latter instrument sometimes altered by stomp-box processing. Though it didn’t arrive with the mingle of exigency and modesty heard on lockdown albums such as Dezron Douglas and Brandee Younger’s Force Majeure or Brad Mehldau’s Suite: April 2020, it was a tense, contemplative solo recital released in January of 2021, and since I hadn’t done heavy research, such as reading the credits, I assumed the session was shaped by pandemic precautions and emotions. In fact, it was recorded over two days in August of 2018. An anxious record that can soothe anxiety, Maquishti is homeopathic. Quiet and rarely propulsive, it contrasts with much of Brennan’s Breaking Stretch, a recently issued set of often danceable music written for a barnburning septet.
Maquishti doesn’t seem to be in direct dialogue with ambient music, but it functions well ambiently and its timbral warmth and low-decibel dissonances can recall something like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. As indicated above, the album, I believe, can be therapeutic, but its melodic and harmonic language leans dark. Some pieces reminded me first of the imagined scores of unseen horror movies (I’ve avoided the genre), then more precisely, though associatively, of two of Michael Small’s seventies scores: for Arthur Penn’s begriming neo-noir, Night Moves; and for The Parallax View, Alan Pakula’s mesmerizing classic of paranoia. “Mudanza (States of Change),” a highlight from the new album, has some of this same eerie quality. In this anxious week, foreboding might be the better word; I hope it’s the wrong one next week. Of Brennan’s professed influences, traces of the great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu are evident on Maquishti, not only because he wrote pieces for vibraphone, marimba, and other percussion instruments, but for his attention to space and silence. Some of Brennan’s other touchstones, such as the marimba tradition of her native Veracruz, are unknown to me.
Soon into the album’s bookish opening track, “Blame It,” you’ll notice the vibraphone’s base sound is being modified not only through light reverb, mallet-derived pitch bending, and the instrument’s inbuilt vibrato (more properly a tremolo). Although there are electric versions, the vibes we most often encounter are essentially acoustic instruments; they have a variable-speed motor for the tremolo effect, but their core sound is produced acoustically. Perhaps you’ve owned a toothbrush that can produce battery-powered vibrations. Brennan’s acoustic sound is recorded—a pair of overhead microphones is normal—but she also runs it through guitar effects. The signal chain, and to some extent the sound itself, is like that of an electromechanical tine piano such as a Rhodes, a vibes cousin or half-sibling. Each of the vibraphone’s bars is fixed with a pickup, and the combined signal goes to a mixing console (analogous to the Rhodes’s preamp), which is fed into a pedal board, from there into an amp. We hear a blend of the acoustic and the filtered, amplified signal. But the strange sounds, too, are a mix: what might sound like Brennan’s live pedal processing probably is that, but it could be an extended vibraphone technique.
If I’m hearing things correctly, Brennan will often sweep through delay speeds to create vertiginous portamenti, much like the signature effect guitarist Mary Halvorson gets with delay used in tandem with an expression pedal. (Brennan, busy as a sideperson, can be heard in Halvorson’s Amaryllis sextet.) There are other modulations, none of them extreme by hip-hop or pop standards but contextually in bold type: rude ascents like a tape machine reeling to speed, pitch drift evocative of unstable analog synths, blippy delays, octave shifts that enable tones beyond the vibraphone’s three-octave range, Teletubby and Chipmunk chatter. On the title track from Brennan’s second album, More Touch—a quartet session with drummer Marcus Gilmore, percussionist Mauricio Herrera, and bassist Kim Cass—she conjures birdsong, and because her pieces are capacious and often tonally open, her music is hospitable to external sounds. Yesterday, I briefly thought a backyard bluejay was on the recording. The music later paired well with an elm leaf being slowly crushed by a mechanically operated sky light, and with the rusty blades of a pair of orange-handled household scissors closing on bubble wrap. The hypnotic marimba pieces are played without processing.
Again, some of these effects have nothing to do with pedals and aren’t always unusual. Unlike pianists, vibes players have access to pitch bending. If you saw vibes innovator Gary Burton perform before his retirement, you might have seen this technique in practice. Or elsewhere. The details are specialized, but basically, if you’re using a four- or six-mallet method, you play with whatever standard mallets you’ve chosen and use a plastic or rubber mallet to slide up or down a struck bar, bending the pitch down about as much as a half step, or sliding it up to the bar’s set pitch. A good, isolated example from Burton—and a famous earlier instance of solo vibraphone—is the version of Steve Swallow’s “Arise, Her Eyes” from 1972’s Alone at Last. From that same album, you can hear vibraphone pitch bending (and multiple keyboards) on Burton’s self-overdubbed cover of “Handbags and Gladrags,” the Mike d’Abo song most memorably done by Rod Stewart. Vibes pitch bending isn’t exactly an expressive, voicelike effect, such as Albert King bending a guitar string; it’s wobbly, displacing, druggy. Brennan pitch bends on pieces such as Maquishti’s “I Like for You to Be Still,” which wouldn’t be a bad title for a horror movie or an out-of-print parenting manual. On “Away from Us,” she plays the bar edges with an orchestral bow, another established extended technique. Elsewhere she plays with binder clips. Sounds like Office Depot’s house brand.
A handful of the album’s pieces were freely improvised. The beautiful closing song, “Derrumbe de Turquesas,” seems to be through-composed. Others, such as “Sonnet,” have framing structures: theme-improv-theme. “Magic Square” has a montuno section that presages the salsa and soca influences foregrounded on some of Breaking Stretch. The debut’s twelve tracks might accept narratological readings but don’t resemble the neat arcs endorsed by screenwriting gurus. There are lots of stories to tell, as you’ve observed. A cab ride from a rehab center to a cemetery is one; a reflective wait for a long-delayed bus is another.
Because the improvised pieces aren’t adrift, and the written material is sometimes nebulous, the methodology behind the pieces, and the pieces themselves, can blur. I said earlier that the album functions ambiently. I don’t mean the music is passive or that it reasserts the obvious point that aesthetic boredom isn’t automatically a defect of the work or its recipient (the recipient’s stupidity, the recipient’s aloofness). The music, you can tell, was played with deep concentration and purpose, and I don’t think it’s interested in boredom as postmodern phenomenology. What I mean is the music is memorable as texture and sound, stimulates intellection, incenses the air. It doesn’t ask us to be virtuously bored but risks boredom as an act of generosity, receding here and there so we can do other stuff in elevated surroundings.
Vote for Kamala Harris.
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