At only 26, Greg Davis has a Masters of Music in Composition
from the New England Conservatory of Music and a degree
in Jazz Studies from DePaul University in Chicago. He
composes contemporary classical music for various ensembles,
and has also released some material as Parallel with
Don Mennerich, and Asterisk. More recently, he has collaborated
with Keith Fullerton Whitman, aka Hrvatski, and New
York based Marumari. To complete the picture, Greg Davis
also runs his own record label, Autumn Records, in Boston,
MA. Arbor is his first album.
Davis first got interested in electronic music through
his Djing and producing hip-hop records. He soon joined
experimental band JAA, before starting recording his
own material. Combining field recordings, processed
sounds and the occasional voice samples with “real”
instruments like guitars, chord organs and glockenspiel,
he offers here a collection of nine beautiful ambient
tracks, all displaying rather unusual acoustic tendencies.
The musical structures created by Davis, very much based
on guitar chords, have very little to do with the vast
majority of the current electronic contemporaries. Instead,
he assembles fragile organic pieces together and attaches
them onto delicate beat constructions. Evoking as much
the ambient excursion of Eno as the urbanist folk of
310 or the emotional incandescence
of Nick Drake even, the music of Davis sits peacefully
between two worlds, drifting at will between both while
always remain within the limits of its own space. Complexity
is not an issue here as intricate melodies flow naturally,
from the peaceful ambience of Submersion Tank Part
One, to the very end of Arbor. Davis alternates
between clever sound arrangements (Submersion Tank,
the intro of Coventry) and almost entirely
acoustic moments (Walking Home, Arbor),
on which he carves seemingly simple melodies. As he
sometimes tampers with both at once, he reaches the
paroxysm of the contradictive nature of his music. Cumulus
is torn between an utterly abstract hip-hop beat and
an subtle guitar line.
Arbor is one of these timeless records that
can be played again and again without losing any of
its original freshness. Greg Davis offers here a beautiful
record, magnificent in its fragility, and delicate in
its might.
5/5 |
