Mark Tucker
Fame Magazine
I reviewed Knox Bronson’s Pop Down the Years a little while back (here) and Seasons has followed with gratifying swiftness but also with an almost shockingly rapid maturation. Completely instrumental in a slow languid pace that urges the listener to relax and luxuriate, where Pop was quirky, interesting, and prog-oriented, Seasons is chambery in the Impressionist sense with tantalizing echoes of Eno (Summer of ‘68 uses the intriguing slow hooning of Discreet Music), Peter Baumann (ca Transharmonic Nights), Peter Michael Hamel, a tranked-out Terry Riley, and the more sensual of the electronicists.
The disc contains just four long songs for an hour’s submersion in
intelligent, slow, spare processionals and ambiences. Michael Hoenig
peeks out occasionally from Autumnal Sun, though the estimable German
never wrote like Bronson does, slowly shifting in sound fields,
coloration, and environmental palette. The attention to perfection here
is bracing, resulting in a piece of spacey furniture music, high art
wanting for nothing, content to take its time in seeping through the
speakers and into cerebellums. Mix the hedonism of the Ibiza crowd with
the seriousness of old Brit/Kraut ventures, then add a sprinkling of
the silently uncanny ideas of Vidna Obmana, and you have a starting
point.
Despite the fact that the quartet of songs was composed during a
dark period in the writer’s life, every minute of Seasons sparkles.
Even the moody segments have a shine and glow lifting them above the
melancholy, indicative of the redemption art brings. The entire
enterprise is pensive but never existentialist, remarkably zen in many
ways, unattached to judgementalism, formula, and tradition. A goodly
portion of the entirety is Debussy-esque, borrowing heavily from tone
poem concepts for heady textures and gestures nailing down authenticity
in genteel certainties alongside intriguing ambiguity. Pore over the
progressive, electronica, and ambient catalogues as you will, you’re
not likely to find very many releases to stand with this one.
