James Holden found trance states as a toddler, hammering out repetitive chords for hours on the piano. For Wacław Zimpel, Polish folks music and American blues supplied early glimpses of upper states of consciousness. Since these introductory ear- and mind-openers, the seek for musical transcendence has guided each artists of their respective journeys. Holden started his profession as an adolescent enjoying capital-T trance music—gated chord stabs, energy-stoking snare rolls, backmasked cymbals, the entire equipment and caboodle—earlier than drifting into more and more woolier strains of ambient techno and digital improv, together with latter-day krautrock, homages to Terry Riley, and pan-global folks music that calls to thoughts benevolent UFOs hovering above Stonehenge. Zimpel, a clarinetist by coaching, has moved by way of free jazz, Indian Carnatic music, and even a 2020 collaboration with Shackleton, the dubstep convert turned arpeggiator shaman. What the 2 males’s work shares is an attentiveness to the trivia of change, and a propensity for sequences that churn like thunderheads on the prowl.
Holden and Zimpel first linked up in 2018, recording collectively within the British musician’s London studio on a handful of dates—linked by a string of gigs that includes the clarinetist as a member of Holden’s touring ensemble, the Animal Spirits. The collaboration yielded the appropriately named Lengthy Weekend EP, 4 tracks of rippling pulses and drones constructed up in reside overdubs of reeds and modular synthesizer, one tune per day. They return now with The Universe Will Take Care of You, a six-track, 51-minute album that feels larger and extra consequential in each approach, folding extra concepts, intensities, moods, and dimensions into its freeform sprawl.
Every of the six tracks is tagged with the date of its creation, a neat little bit of marginalia that offers us some thought of how the classes unrolled. The album begins on July 19, 2022, their third consecutive day of recording, at which level they have been effectively and really cooking. After a short, breath-catching introduction that faintly recollects the vocoded lead-in to Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”—and given the title, “You Are Gods,” the reference will not be fully coincidental—they explode into motion, unleashing volley after volley of rapid-fire arpeggios that transfer far too quick for mere mortals to parse. (Thirty-second notes? Sixth-fourth notes? Your guess is pretty much as good as mine.) Burbling and twisting, branching and recombining, they alter shade as they go, arpeggios erupting out of arpeggios, like jets of water in an illuminated fountain. Holden is credited with “arpeggio clouds,” Zimpel with alto clarinet, organ, and “grains,” however which sounds belong to whom is anybody’s guess—the joys of the factor is in its overwhelming totality. Often, an unintended melody asserts itself in a sequence of notes that one way or the other, by some miracle of filtering and timbre, breaks by way of the blur, however it’d be inconceivable to trace each voice, a lot much less each be aware; it’s sufficient to let all of it wash over you, a jacuzzi for the thoughts.
