Laptop folk music
02/22/2002
(5 out of 5 stars)
"At only 26, Greg Davis has a Masters of Music in Composition from the New England Conservatory of Music and a degree in Jazz Studies from DePaul University in Chicago. He composes contemporary classical music for various ensembles, and has also released some material as Parallel with Don Mennerich, and Asterisk. More recently, he has collaborated with Keith Fullerton Whitman, aka Hrvatski, and New York based Marumari. To complete the picture, Greg Davis also runs his own record label, Autumn Records, in Boston, MA. Arbor is his first album.Davis first got interested in electronic music through his Djing and producing hip-hop records. He soon joined experimental band JAA, before starting recording his own material. Combining field recordings, processed sounds and the occasional voice samples with "real" instruments like guitars, chord organs and glockenspiel, he offers here a collection of nine beautiful ambient tracks, all displaying rather unusual acoustic tendencies. The musical structures created by Davis, very much based on guitar chords, have very little to do with the vast majority of the current electronic contemporaries.
Instead, he assembles fragile organic pieces together and attaches them onto delicate beat constructions. Evoking as much the ambient excursion of Eno as the urbanist folk of 310 or the emotional incandescence of Nick Drake even, the music of Davis sits peacefully between two worlds, drifting at will between both while always remain within the limits of its own space. Complexity is not an issue here as intricate melodies flow naturally, from the peaceful ambience of Submersion Tank Part One, to the very end of Arbor. Davis alternates between clever sound arrangements (Submersion Tank, the intro of Coventry) and almost entirely acoustic moments (Walking Home, Arbor), on which he carves seemingly simple melodies. As he sometimes tampers with both at once, he reaches the paroxysm of the contradictive nature of his music. Cumulus is torn between an utterly abstract hip-hop beat and an subtle guitar line.Arbor is one of these timeless records that can be played again and again without losing any of its original freshness. Greg Davis offers here a beautiful record, magnificent in its fragility, and delicate in its might.
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