Highly Recommended
Musician | 03/27/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Too many years ago I went through something few working Americans ever get a chance to experience - a three-week vacation. Bear with me for a minute. Workaholic that I am, I spent the first week bolting awake at 7 a.m., rushing through my shower, inhaling my breakfast, fidgeting on the beach, checking voicemail, making to-do lists. But by the end of the second week, something funny happened. Staring out to sea, I noticed a couple of kids trying to body surf. They swam out, frantically tried to catch a wave, missed it, swam back out, missed it, again and again, the same pattern - swim, miss, swim, miss. This went on for quite a while, until quite unexpectedly, one of the kids did catch a wave. It lifted him up and carried him forward and gently settled him onto the beach at my feet. And I laughed. For the third week of my vacation, I slept in, took two-hours at breakfast, swam in the ocean.
What I'm getting at is a rather subtle, but potent issue about time, and how we spend it. The majority of the music we listen to is like fast food - extremes of dynamics, texture, sound, text - all crammed into three minutes. Television, work, movies, phone calls, shopping - it's all the same bit. What's so very different, and good, about these Still Life recordings is that they take their time. Aside from feeling remarkably calm and relaxed after listening to the first disc, I found myself wondering at the amount of time I had wasted in front of the television or aimlessly shopping online for nothing. The value is in the very act of allowing yourself to sit down and wait for the music to unfold, very slowly, very carefully - not the first three minutes, but the entire disc. These pieces are full of wonderful surprises, all of them completely natural in sound, but the kind of surprises that you have to first relax and wait for to let happen.
Highly recommended.
"
