Cory Allen – Still

It would be easy to start talking about the sea again, but that’s not it. Closer would be the discrepancy between the tiny and the vast: the unusually-shaped rock noticed the moment before a panoramic vista, for example, or an ocean contained within a particular inhalation of seawater scent. “Art is not the imitation of nature,” wrote Adorno, “but the imitation of natural beauty.” So the whole of it fits inside a single resonating note. Or spreads to fill an entire spectrum of sound.

The title “Still” would imply a moment in which nothing happens – nothing except the moment itself, perhaps. A kind of frozen movement, a dialectics at a standstill (to abuse Walter Benjamin’s phrase). So it is sometimes more useful to think of these four tracks as paintings or photographs, each with a beginning, middle, and end that occur simultaneously, rather than following a linear path of progression. The question moves from one of listening to one of looking, from “what do you hear?” to “what do you see?”.

And of course there is the whole issue of form, of whether nature could be said to have form or whether it is simply random, whether we impose our our impressions of form upon it or whether the appearance of form is nature appearing as nature through us. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of “Still” is the way in which form appears as something that emerges out of the music itself, rather than being imposed upon it from the outside. Individual elements – chiming, hissing, marimba-like or brittle – are encountered seemingly by chance, yet the whole is cohesive and complete, having a clear wholeness to it. This is the nature of sand dunes and snowflakes, patterns distilled from orderless components (because it is still true to say that sand knows no dune!). This is not the imitation of nature, but the imitation of natural beauty – not the imitation of an object, but of a certain process of appearing or happening.

Cory Allen’s last album “Pearls” was highly regarded by many, and the release of “Still” should only further enhance his reputation as a maker of intelligent, perceptive, beautiful music; fans of Marcus Fischer’s “Monocoastal” and other recent 12k releases should find Allen’s work slotting nicely into their collections. Currently there seems to be a wealth of new music being released that engages creatively and imaginatively with nature and the productive tensions between the organic and the digital, and “Still” places Allen among the leading lights of this movement. The album is available in CD and download formats from Quiet Design, the Austin-based label curated by Allen and Mike Vernusky.

- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio

www.quietdesign.us
www.cory-allen.com