This debut release from young Cambridge, Massachusetts-based composer Gabriel Brady was apparently recorded in his dorm room with little more than a bouzouki, a violin, and a “compact modular synth setup,” but it often sounds like it could have been the work of a veteran and visionary tape loop artist. As far as I know, there were no actual tape loops involved in these recordings, but Brady ingeniously achieved a similar effect by feeding his acoustic instruments into his synth, which acted as a "sound chamber for further manipulation (loops, effects, textures).”
I have heard it said before that some artists release their greatest work while unsuccessfully trying to mimic their influences, then lose that precarious magic when they finally get it right. Hopefully, that fate never befalls Brady, but it is worth noting that his primary inspirations are French New Wave film scores and early Impressionist composers like Satie and Debussy. More specifically, Brady set out to chase the “sense of yearning” conjured by Jean Constantin’s 400 Blows score. In that regard, Brady succeeds most beautifully on the back-to-back highlights “Ordinary” and “Land and Sea.”
In “Ordinary,” Brady weaves a sensuous and delicate web of grainy, twinkling music box-esque melodies that subtly warp, smear, and fade in and out of focus. The brief “Land and Sea,” on the other hand, sounds like a wistful late-night jazz bar electric piano reverie bleeding into a twanging, pointillist lattice of bouzouki arpeggios. It is my favorite piece on the album by a landslide, as the ragged sharpness of the bouzouki perfectly complements the languorous, dreaminess of piano melodies while also engaging in a seamless melodic interplay. The opening “Womb” is a sublime pleasure as well, as its blearily bittersweet chord strums and enigmatic murkiness evoke a moonlit tropical grotto scene.
The remaining pieces are similarly compelling, but a bit more eclectic and playfully experimental in nature. In the brief “Attune,” for example, gently rippling bouzouki arpeggios are gradually enveloped by a sonorous church organ, while “Streetlight” suggests the lovesick strains of a Parisian torch song trio drifting out onto a lonely, rain-swept street. Elsewhere, “Untitled” is the most adventurously weird piece, as a bright, percussive piano loop unpredictably changes pitch in delirious, seasick fashion beneath a jazzy, lyrical violin melody. The dreamily rippling closer "Ambrosial" is a bit less outré, but makes similarly disorienting use of unpredictable tremolo swoops.
While I do wish that Day-blind was a bit more substantial than a mere 20 minutes or so, Brady definitely has a cool thing going here and I cannot fault him for embracing a “leave ‘em wanting more” approach, as there are no weak or uninspired pieces to be found. At its best, Day-blind feels like a distressed and hiss-soaked mixtape of elegantly Romantic French film scores fitfully disrupted by dissonantly out-of-tune pitch shifts and drop outs that reveal glimpses of thornier, twangier, and more rustic-sounding previous recordings. This is quite an impressive debut, as I sincerely doubt that I will hear many other pieces this year that can rival the beauty of “Land and Sea.”
Listen here.
