Reflective by Joel Futterman

"I have been following avidly Joel Futterman's evolving pianism and attendant aesthetic developments since 2011, more sporadically before that, and while each release is unique within the parameters of his pianistic syntax, this one comprises an entirely different narrative. While so many of Futterman's odysseys transcend the half-hour, the longest on this collection of vignettes doesn't reach 11 minutes. Similarly brief exhortations bring several of his discs to a close, but they constitute a concluding consideration or query. These 19 aphorisms, themselves comprising aphorisms within, stand as a serialization of Futterman's art in restatement and radical departure, a galaxy of ideas starkly related to one another.

These miniatures, astonishing in recurrence and requiring the deepest listening to hear it, summarize in each instant as much as they portend. In recent years, Futterman has expanded, elasticized, his exploration of the overtone. The album's opening sonorities ring those narrative changes, the first blissfully outside of conventional tonality fading to a near-silence broken only by a harmonically related chord in sharp staccato. The succeeding sustains, gentle in their repose, birth the merest fragment of a melody, Webernian in its briefly emotive import and then subsumed by yet another staccato chord which will return, appended, moments later. Changing tempo and dynamic level, sustain and staccato become opposing forces, and only at the very end does a sense of "tonal" resolution occur with a single sustain pitch and an ascending arpeggiation that sets the entire keyboard in vibration.

The album thrives on similar long-term relationships while continuously expanding them beyond any perceived boundaries, constantly thwarting expectations. The sustained opening of the fourth vignette prepares the way for the fifth's rapid-fire invocations and sudden descent into an entirely unanticipated and sparsely mysterious texture. The 9th piece's recurrent circular melody stands in direct contrast to the vast interregistral points and slashes confronting us in the 10th's rhythmically varied intricacies. Each piece reflects its antecedent and consequent, just as each component of each piece reflects its surroundings. The whole is a pathway of mirrors, signposts, dialogues, connections and resolutions leading ultimately, inexorably, to the breathtaking ballad at the discs conclusion. It is simultaneously the first vignette's antipode and counterpart, the end and the beginning a unity of purpose and execution."-Marc Medwin

Squid Note Records is a division of the online record store and music distribution service, Squidco LLC. Our obsession is with improvised, experimental and contemporary forms of music and sound.

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