Jeff GREINKE - NOCTILUCENT
Jeff Greinke’s new album Noctilucent, latin for “night shining,” takes its name from a rare cloud that glows with wavy striations of light, closer to the stars than any other in the sky. Here, Greinke demonstrates his mastery of sonic world-building. Just as the word “noctilucent” comes ready with an image, each of these nine pieces sets a sonic scene for the listener.
For this album, Greinke drew inspiration from the visual and aural surroundings near his Tucson home. On this inspiration, Greinke says: “I take long walks in the desert, sometimes at night under a full moon and am often inspired by what I see, hear, and experience - the texture of the landscape, clouds, the sound of birds and insects, changing light, and different kinds of weather.” He crafted Noctilucent by exploring synthesizers and sound manipulation as he explored the desert. When a sound caught his ear, he honed in on it. A bright tone, an eerie chime: at first a lone figure in an unfinished diorama. Then, he layered detail after detail over that first sound—and set the scene.
Each piece on Noctilucent offers a vivid world to wander through. Opener “Unrest” immediately draws the listener into a dense and complex world. A whistle is the evening wind across dark sands while a reverberation is an insect’s fluttering wings. And yet, subterranean clangs signal something ominous stirring beneath. The title track is a nighttime walk down a moonlit street, moths making dusty halos around amber streetlamps. And somehow, far above, the sky is clear but for those impossible clouds. The moths do not see them, but they are there.
Noctilucent stimulates the listener’s imagination, invites visualization. The night is the realm of the unknown, the hidden, when all things are veiled by shade. There is danger and discovery in the unknown, and thus it beguiles. This is night music: nine pieces that strike the balance of tranquility and menace that can only be struck in the dark.
John Gregorius - IN AWE
In Awe, Gregorius’s fourth album for Spotted Peccary, is a sonic pilgrimage, a moving meditation, an album of both dynamism and peace. These nine compositions blend sweeping ambience, rock rhythms and sterling guitar work as only John Gregorius can. An album of personal growth and spiritual discovery, In Awe was inspired by long periods of meditation, and the connection that can be found through immersion in the natural world. Wonder permeates this album: the sense of wonder that only acknowledging oneself as a part of something greater can bring.
In Awe finds Gregorius taking his trademark ambient guitar sound in new compositional directions, using more verse, chorus and bridge structures to evoke a journey through the desert or along the shoreline. On “Light,” Gregorius’s guitar glimmers like the silver crests of sun-kissed waves. On “Here Now,” a yearning hook recurs like a question left unanswered. Wistful acoustic flourishes entwine and disentwine from the melody at the song’s stunning bridge. And beneath, drums like footsteps in sand, marching towards realization. “Open,” finds a subsumed kick drum emboldening movement, adventure, exploration. Then—as quick as it comes—the kick drum subsides. It leaves an aural clearing, like stepping through entwined branches to find a sunlit meadow: a place to stand still and marvel.
Gregorius begins all his compositions with a guitar, a looper and reverb. Each of these rich, immersive pieces was built from this simple foundation, with guitar loops forming much of the album’s background ambience. He recorded most of the album on an Ovation 1867, a Paul Reed Smith electric, in Robert Fripp’s New Standard Tuning. In Awe features collaborations with vocalist Kim Daniels, bassist Sean O’Bryan Smith, and drummer Mitch Ross, as well as a synth bed from Benjamin Fleury-Steiner on “Everyday Miracle.”
In Awe springs from the idea that everything is miraculous. The result is a joyous blend of acoustic and electric, digital and analog, and—in Gregorius’s words: a “thank you for the beauty around us, and for the deeper purpose we can experience.”
CRAIG PADILLA & MARVIN ALLEN - WEATHERING THE STORM
Weathering the Storm is the third collaboration by electronic ambient veteran Craig Padilla and electric guitar virtuoso Marvin Allen for Spotted Peccary Music. Like their two prior releases, Toward the Horizon and Strange Gravity, Weathering the Storm sees Padilla and Allen build a dreamlike, dramatic electronic landscape that they could only create together.
Not only a trilogy in sonic stylings, all three of Padilla and Allen’s collaborations feature the Umbrella Girl depicted on the cover. She represents all of us looking for our own way of existence amidst the chaos of the world. She is an open-minded seeker, and these soundscapes are her explorations.
Weathering the Storm is a hypnotic fusion of early 70s krautrock and modern electronic ambient production. On the title track, Allen’s 12-string acoustic guitar synchronizes with Padilla’s analog synthesizers, standing ground against a swirl of electric guitar and mellotron. On “Aquatic,” Padilla and Allen incorporate found sounds—wind and thunder from a tornado forming, trucks roaring down a wet road, rainfall—into a Tangerine Dream-inspired texture of reversed piano and organ.
On Weathering the Storm, Craig Padilla and Marvin Allen have once again blended guitar and synthesizer, old and new, into a captivating sonic odyssey.
DEBORAH MARTIN & JILL HALEY - INTO THE QUIET
Into the Quiet is the second collaboration between electronic ambient visionary Deborah Martin and renowned Oboist Jill Haley. It follows 2021’s The Silence of Grace, which received numerous accolades—including making Zone Music Reporter’s Top 20 albums of the year. Once again, Martin and Haley blend electronic textures and classical instrumentation into works of rapturous calm. Whereas The Silence of Grace was inspired by the beauty of the natural world, Into the Quiet draws from internal landscapes, inspired by the idea that one must go “into the quiet” to find what is hidden in themselves.
These eight compositions demonstrate the depth and intricacies that stillness can contain. Opener “Sleeping Giants” surges with choral warmth. Then, on the title track, flute and horn wend around a warbling synth loop. “Hall of Whispers” is simultaneously melancholy and pastoral; harp and oboe play a shimmering duet while low textures flow around them like wind whistling through ruins of ancient stone.
Into the Quiet reunites two masters of their craft with spellbinding results. These eight pieces show the serenity of space, allowing each note and melody to naturally unwind, and inviting the listener to do the same.
DAVID HELPLING- IN
Before David Helpling released his trilogy of epic ambient collaborations with Jon Jenkins, before his shimmering guitar records A Sea Without Memory and RUNE—he had an idea that would become IN. A massive double album composed over ten years, IN was born from finding wonder in the tiniest of places. Only one square inch of forest holds a world of color and life. On this miniature scale, a shard of lichen is a monument, a twig a skyscraper, an arm’s length a universe. IN is an exploration of that space: a new fantasy world to wander.
IN builds this world with sounds from across Helpling’s career. Diamond-bright guitar twinkles atop churning synth on wistful opener “Waves Dream of Breaking.” Chimes and echoes conjure cavernous yearning on “The Cold Distance Between,” while the climactic “In Waves of Fire” ascends on thundering drums before a shattering crescendo. Across this cinematic album, analogue synthesizers, digital synthesizers and ambient guitar entwine, untangle and entwine again. Yet here, Helpling explores new instruments as well as familiar ones. A 1981 Yamaha CP70 Electric Grand Piano brings a new, organic sound as it explores the vast scenes set by his textural guitar. This piano murmurs across chasms in the aftermath of “In Waves of Fire,” a glossy pebble in the receding tide.
Unique and diverse artists stepped into Helpling’s vision with their own inspired expressions. Portland fine art photographer Brandt Campbell captured IN’s micro-world in breathtaking macrophotography. Co-producer Howard Givens worked closely with Helpling to explore the hidden nuances of this album and elevate each piece to its final form. Matthew Schoening’s electric cello is enchanting and elegiac on “The Bliss You Always Carried.” Miriam Stockley lends her rich, ethereal vocals to “Slipping” and “I Too Am Coming Home,” balancing hope and melancholy with each ebb and flow of her voice. Award-winning multi-instrumentalist Benji Wertheimer plays the esraj, an expressive bowed instrument from India, on the buoyant “You Already Are.” Vocalist Nidhi Bhatmuley gives a soaring performance on the post-rock flavored “This Burning Sky,” an emotional epic that evokes Hans Zimmer’s work with Lisa Gerrard.
Inspired by the vastness of small spaces, IN is both simple and intricate, both expansive and intimate. And just as the spaces that inspired them, these thirteen pieces unveil new images when examined.Here, a pebble by a stream is a fjord falling into the sea. Here, nature wrought in new colors; the greens and blues of tree and sky replaced by microbial fuchsia, folded violet. Here, a world—vivid, vibrant, waiting.