Anagrams - Blue Voices - New LP Record 2023 Balmat Spain Vinyl - Jazz / Electronic / Ambient

Together, JD Walsh and Jeff Crompton are Anagrams, and their debut album Blue Voices might initially seem like a departure from Balmat's habitually electronic terrain. It's not ambient music, but it's also not not ambient music, at least to listeners in the right frame of mind. On Blue Voices, Crompton plays alto and tenor saxophone, clarinet, electric piano, and organ; Walsh lets his experimental tendencies take the lead. Playing acoustic and electric guitars, electric lap steel, bass, Moog Matriarch, modular synth, and programmed drums, he concentrates his energies on richly textural layers and abstract assemblages of tone color. Across the album's 11 tracks, there are faint echoes of familiar touchstones: the atmospheric twang of Daniel Lanois' pedal steel; the mercurial modal runs of Ethio-jazz; the late-summer calm of Fuubutsushi; the versatility of players and composers like Patrick Shiroishi and Sam Gendel, who are asking similar questions about where jazz ends and some other, nameless territory begins. Mostly, though, what Blue Voices captures is the quixotic sound of two restless musical imaginations making it up as they go along, two voices discovering a shared language in a hitherto unexplored shade of blue.

Track Listing:
A1. Birds On Clifton
A2. Blue Voices
A3. Hymn No. 2
A4. Catch It
A5. Ex Uno Plures
B1. Hidden Hearts
B2. Another Cloud
B3. Song in Six
B4. Interesting Times
B5. Let Us Sing Sad Songs Together
B6. What Is Left Is Music