Glass Triangle - Blue and Sun-lights
Not too long ago, harpist Zeena Parkins, alto-saxophonist Mette Rasmussen and drummer Ryan Sawyer gathered at a studio in Brooklyn to record their second record as Glass Triangle. Parkins describes the scenario as strange, a three-hour, early-morning session during which they had to work around another band’s recording set-up. “It shouldn’t have yielded results,” she says. “But magically it did!”
Granted, they had just spent three evenings sharpening their connection with a run at the Stone. If Blue and Sun-Lights is infused with magic – in this case, magic flows from a combination of skill, chemistry, luck and the x-factor of cosmic inspiration – it comes as no surprise.
Glass Triangle borrows its name from the work of sculptor Josiah McElheny and is fittingly sparklingly tactile. Blue and Sun-Lights refers to a hallucinogenic film by McElheny and Jeff Preiss, and like the first record, it is richly textured. The listener might feel an impossible urge to reach out and touch, to drag fingers through dense ripples of sound, or run hands over sharp, shining edges.
Where Glass Triangle immediately tossed the listener into the free jazz deep-end, Blue and Sun-Lights takes a moment to draw a few slow, percussive breaths. On opener “Earth O,” Sawyer’s snare shudders and Rasmussen’s sax sighs, as Parkins’ electric harp (which can sound like so many things) begins to interject, weaving voltaic jabs into a staticky futuristic landscape.
From there, these three very different voices push and pull at one-another, moving from lively, good
natured argument to harmonious agreement and back again. In their own far-out, forward-facing way, they build a narrative tension that evokes the most thrilling mid-century film composers.
The pleasures here are myriad, sometimes clear and prismatic, sometimes heavily, bruisingly physical. Each listen, like magic, reveals something beautiful, surprising and new.
