Cold Blue to Release New Chas Smith Album

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

One week from today, Cold Blue Music will release an album entitled simply Three, consisting of three compositions by Chas Smith. The good news is that Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-ordering this new CD. The bad news is that the Web page provides no useful content other than the track listing on the back cover. This article will try to compensate for that rampant ignorance.

The title basically refers to the fact that there are three compositions on the album. They are ordered by increasing duration, and all of them last for a little more than a quarter of an hour. The titles of the tracks, in their “order of appearance,” are “Distance,” “The Replicant,” and “The End of Cognizance.”

The advance material I received for this album states that each of these pieces is “an ever-evolving single gesture, a seamless blend of tones and timbres from [Smith’s] metal sound sculptures … and his homemade steel guitars.” Looking back on past articles about albums, I realized that this was the latest in several offerings that reminded me of the “ambient” compositions of Brian Eno and the series of albums he released of similar approaches taken by other composers. Where Smith is concerned, it would be appropriate to observe that he builds his own instruments; and his acts of construction are as much a part of the music as is how he plays those instruments in the creation of the three tracks on this album.

Somewhat in the spirit of Harry Partch, those instruments are given names that are just as engaging as the sounds they emit. The metal sound sculptures that Smith plays include Que Lastas, Bertoia, Lockheed, Towers, Sceptre, and Parabaloid. The jacket that holds the CD has five photographs of these sculptures but no captions to identify which is which. The guitars include a bass steel along with two invented instruments, Guitarzilla and Jr. Blue. Smith has also deployed his guitar work to perform the music of Harold Budd, whose music often shares Eno’s “ambient aesthetic.” Furthermore, because listening to Smith’s music cultivates attention to subtle details in the fabric of a deceptively uniform environment, he establishes at least a modest kinship with the “deep listening” performances organized by Pauline Oliveros.

It goes without saying that patience is prerequisite for listening to Three. If one tries too hard to sort out foreground from background, one is likely to get frustrated very quickly. While this is a genre that appeals to me now as much as it did when I encountered it in recordings produced by Eno, I realize that I am probably part of a minority. Those seeking to join me there may wish to begin with one-track-at-a-time listening. After one has adjusted to the time-span of a quarter-hour, one can then move on to larger scales of duration.