艺术家: Tom Eaton
专辑名称: How It Happened
发行时间: 2019
厂牌: Spotted Peccary
音乐流派: New Age
音频编解码 24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC
试听地址: Album Preview
How it Happened is not happy or cheerful music, it is
consistently calm, sometimes dark and somber. The instruments are all
held deep in the glowing sound of the ambient reverberation haze. There
are keyboards ranging from what sounds to me like a huge stadium-size in
magnitude piano, to a whimsical harmonium, plus an actual accordion,
and of course synthesizers, lush and rich in timbre and tone. Each song
has lots of extra silence in the distance between one ending and one
beginning. There might be just four notes played on the entire album,
over and over again like waves on the shore, and they are ample. It
works perfectly, just what the medicine man ordered. Relax. It is also
good for your blood pressure too. Listen for yourself! Breathe out and
soar into beauty. Utterly superb, highly recommended.
TOM EATON AND HIS MUSIC The
music floats up into the air and shimmers, hanging there like an Aurora
Borealis, just above your speakers. A sound that is timeless, easy,
gentle, refreshing, and certainly restful. There is no hurry anywhere on
this album, no driving rhythm or beat, no pulse pumping percussion,
nothing like that. The compositions have very few notes, very simple,
sustained open melodies, always slowly repeating and easy, like
daydreaming clouds. Like a distant mountain mirage, huge and steady.
Relaxing and complex, music for those moments when you want to breathe
out and reflect.
Tom Eaton plays piano, synths, acoustic and
electric guitars, fretted and fretless basses, accordion, and percussion
on this album, which has the title How it Happened and is his first
release on the Spotted Peccary Music label. Some of his influences
include Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre and Tim Story.
How
it Happened is what he considers to be his third major solo album. The
first two are not his first ever, but he likes to draw the line there.
The two previous albums are Abendromen (2016), the first part of the
title is “Abend” which means evening, and “Dromen” is dreams; followed
very shortly afterwards by Indesterren (2016), which means “into the
stars.” Plus, there is a single, “Matjora is Still Alive” (2018), which
is a cover of a Johannes Schmoelling delight. All three of these
recordings are on his own label, Riverwide and can be found on Bandcamp.
These recordings are all piano based, with lots of fancy production
work for an amazing and distinguished polished sound. Did I mention that
Eaton has worked as a producer and engineer with Will Ackerman at
Windham Hill since about 2010?
THE ALBUM HOW IT HAPPENED Tom Eaton - How It Happened - Electronic Music of Brainvoyager
Let’s
get back to How it Happened, which as a title makes me think it’s going
to be someone explaining something that possibly went a little wrong.
Or perhaps it is the title for a comedy sketch, or how about a murder
mystery? This music is very far from any of that. The sound is very
polished and elegant, breathless even. Delicate. Delicious! He does not
do the driving beat thing. I hear a piano, but the sound on this album
is more complex, textured, more ambient and richer than the previous
works. Often there are only a few notes, played very slowly, repeating
as your thoughts are allowed to soar and sparkle.
The pictures in
the little booklet that comes with the album show the surface of a
river in the wintertime with some floating sheets of ice, no snow, but
the vegetation looks cold and brown, far from spring or summer in
appearance. The music is cold and pure, but not dramatically so. Some of
the details are tiny and delicate and the sound is very simple, all of
the feeling is calm and refreshing. Restful and engaging. It is a
fantastic album for dreaming!
A CRACKING SOUND LIKE ICE BREAKING… …is
heard from under the water. The music drifts in from the void,
synthesizer and piano with rare odd celestial crackles and an ethereal
distant angelic choir. The first song is “Ice” (5:37) and it establishes
the mood, lush and full, without clutter or jumble. There is a deep
glacial feeling to the sound, with dark pauses and those occasional
celestial crackles that could be coming from colliding sheets of ice up
in a cold windy world above.
Synthesizer keyboards with piano,
steadily developing in complexity, but overall very hazy and cloudy, and
shimmering, “An Unexpected Opening” (7:58) continues after the
introduction of this album with a distant easy pace. It glides into
ringing tones with partial melodies that glow, reverberation lingering,
chords break and then fade. Tones play in a slow dance, a few notes and
then they hang there reverberating, then a few more notes. This takes
away the hurry and allows you to relax and let go of your tension.
The
title piece, “MK, And How It Happened” (7:19) presents a further
evolution of the album’s developing subdued melody concept, piano tones
with a synthesizer glow gently lingering overhead. Eventually, a
drifting accordion joins an electric guitar with celestial processing.
Also, I hear haunting memories and sad recollections under tons of
reverberation and echoes. This is also very slow in the pace and
progression as the song unfolds.
THEN THE TRACK… …”The Slow
River” (9:21) with sustained tones layers of synth frost, with a piano
in there too. The sound is all deep and undemanding.
“Later, At
Night, By the Lake” (6:58) begins with sort of high pitched bell
reverberations, also there are quantities of synthesizer glow; the music
of a night sky with all the stars very bright, floating in the deep
dark beyond the silver moon, the sound of magic.
An ethereal
choir in the distance just singing one note, with a hint of synthesizer
to frame it. This extends the magical spell created so far, continuing
the established mood. Slowly some kind of strings, or keyboard, forms a
repeating pattern, infinitive past participle. The title of this song,
“Genezen” (13:01) is an old word that means “to return home to recover,
to heal” and this song finishes with an extended section featuring a few
notes over and over again repeating a melody, slow of course. Piano and
synthesizer and ambient electric guitar.
A GENTLE SOFT GLOW… …of
a shimmering synthesizer fades back into deep silence. The title of
this track is “The Fog and the Lifting” (6:25). The piano emerges after
that, encased in the slow soft synth glow. Now the synth slides forward,
and now the piano is up front in the sound mix, back and forth, gentle
is the right word. An electric guitar with lots of processing slides in
and about then ponderously it fades back into deep silence, sustained
slowly drifting. It never goes completely silent, but it does slow down
and darkens.
There is no time, you just float, synthesizer with
piano and accordion. “Until Her Eyelids Flutter Open” (13:47). This is
my personal favorite of the collection, it has the timeless theme of the
album and it also adds a lighter mood, like dawn approaching. She is
going to wake up any second now, and then things will begin. For now, we
wait and reflect on all the best events of her past.
01. Tom Eaton - Ice 02. Tom Eaton - An Unexpected Opening 03. Tom Eaton - Mk, and How It Happened 04. Tom Eaton - The Slow River 05. Tom Eaton - Later, At Night, By the Lake 06. Tom Eaton - Genezen 07. Tom Eaton - The Fog and the Lifting 08. Tom Eaton - Until Her Eyelids Flutter Open
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