- Mesmerizing explorations of an obscure breath-controlled synthesizer modeled on the trumpet.
- A trumpet player by training, Ann Arbor's Justin Walter performs in various jazz and Afrobeat ensembles around Michigan. Over the past decade, he's also tracked a separate, though parallel, solo career centered on an ever-developing relationship with the Electronic Valve Instrument, an obscure breath-controlled analog synthesizer from the dustbin of '70s hardware. The EVI can be played like a trumpet—manipulated by keys and breath pressure—but Walter looks to it for a range of completely different sounds. The resulting tracks, developed from edited improvisations with the instrument, bring to mind easy comparisons to ECM and jazz fusion, but also Cluster and Keith Fullerton-Whitman. A given Walter track is likely to shift from shimmering melody to buzzing rumble at a moment's notice. It's music that draws you in, but lurches and shoves too. A languorous, misty quality hangs over it all, though—a natural fit for Chicago's Kranky Records, Walter's home for three albums and counting.
Where previous records folded in bits of piano and occasional percussive dust-ups, Destroyer narrows the scope, relying confidently on the EVI. A few tracks ("Fear 17," "New Pads'') incorporate melancholy trumpet lines, while a pump organ plays a crucial supporting role. Walter integrates these elements subtly, to the point that it's not immediately clear where the EVI ends and that pump organ (another wind-powered instrument) begins. It's essentially a synthesizer record, but one informed by Walter's experience with the trumpet.
"In recent years I've come to see the trumpet as an instrument that speaks in slow and long sounds, with meaning coming from the shape and inflection of each note," he wrote in press materials for 2013's Lullabies And Nightmares. This is a guiding principle for his explorations of the EVI, as well. The drawn-out note turns out to be Walter's secret weapon. The slight modulations of the held notes add resonance and complexity to the unadorned melodies of "1002" and "Transitions." It's just as effective a couple minutes into "Radio Contact," when a gleaming sustained tone cuts through layers of brooding organ, time seeming somehow to slow down around it.
The title track works a similar trick, far more expansive than its four-minute runtime has any right to be. Agitated thrums and atonal scrapes swell portentously, break, and then recede into a gently lapping synthesizer reverie like something from Gigi Masin's Wind. Right on that track's heels, "New Pads" is a suite in three parts, with swirling electronic wisps giving way to a solemn organ-led folk ballad. Finally, as the disparate parts converge, Walter introduces a sonorous trumpet to deliver a soaring highlight at the record's midsection. Album closer "Slow Walkers" is another standout, but of a different sort. It's one of the record's gentlest pieces, Walter forgoing dissonance this time to let the untroubled synth washes capture a serene twilight mood.
Though it's music shaped through editing, sequencing and layering, Walter's sensitivity as an improviser is what stands out most. Destroyer feels guided by intuition, pursued more than composed. Buoyed by Walter's still-fresh fascination with what has become his signature instrument, it's a record suffused with a sense of discovery: tranquility revealing itself amid the restless, emotive tension of performance.
Tracklist01. For Us
02. Radio Contact
03. Transitions
04. Destroyer
05. New Pads
06. Fear 17
07. Cliff The Cloud Catcher
08. 11.27
09. 1002
10. Inner Voices
11. Slow Walkers