GREG HEADLY – There comes a violent love / Pulse

(CD, 28 Angles)

Greg Headly has landed the enormous leap from intricate electronic musician to modern composer now. After his eloquent and fascinating re-work of Gustav Holst’s “the operation of the heavens” and studies into the core of sounds (academic or not, who cares either way?) he now presents two pieces of modern composition that prove he has found a new language to work with. A way more complex and mysterious language, not as easy to decipher than before, but a mesmerizing and intensely fascinating language as well.

“There comes a violent love” is almost like a modern chamber orchestra piece, with four parts in various modes of tranquility and complexity. Modes of sounds, denominated by various instruments, appear as from nowhere and then recede back into the darkness. Most inspiring are the leaking piano drops of “blessed darkness” but also the softly droning spheres with flutes (played by Yvette Caldwell. layered on top of “let me still be touched by grace” are soothing and reconciling. For all of them it is true to say that the holes between the notes, the free space of sounds slowly fading out or sending their subconscious echo beforehand, are as important as the notes played. At times field recordings of the ocean underline phrases and movements. “There comes...” is an intriguing, fascinating piece of music that perfectly predicts the feeling of calm before the storm breaks loose. As people tell me, there is always a certain time of calm before a reckless, intense love affair breaks loose as well. Without wanting to touch the personal life of Headly, this idea nevertheless starts a lot of pictures and stories inside the listeners head.

The second piece, “Pulse” is a much more straightforward strategic idea, but nevertheless just as fascinating. Keyboards abound (played or worked out together with Toshi Osawa) in a slow but slowly rising dynamic. It would be easy to root this piece back to the array of legendary minimal composers with synthesizers and then try to judge it for what it’s worth in comparison. But that is not my way of perceiving music. I am more interested in effect, and “Pulse” is serious and meditative at the same time. The pulse is not available on the surface but has to be felt by the listener. Like the long time meditations of zen masters, who reduce their breathing to almost nil, the pulse inside these soft layers of keyboards is also reduced to almost inaudibility. But it is there and it needs close listening and the will to be captured by it. A letting lose sort of mindset is necessary, and patience.

Headly has taken a long route to come to the musical point where he is now, from free improvisation on all kinds of guitars to manipulating these sounds with the computer, slowly leaving the guitar out and turning towards composition, finding an interest in compositional theory and rubbing shoulders with classical composition to the suites presented on his latest CD. It is an easy guess to say, that it won’t stop there, but what is more important, is to see how his approach and vision becomes more and more skillfull, unique and fascinating. Sound is like an organism and has its own live, that can include times of restless chaos as well as laidback resting and contemplating. The secluded live of a thinker, whose main adventures happen inside his mind, is not at all the worst kind of live there is. For sounds and for humans.