CD Feature/ Tomas Phillips: "Six Notes"
TobiasTomas Phillips focusses on moment by moment creation on this release, which consists of a solitary seventeen minute assemblage of sound. Perhaps it's best appreciated as a strip of microthoughts. Motifs are tried and tested; some ripple the space and then disperse into the larger whole, revivifying it with a profoundly meditative weight, while others are accepted into the flow, such as the tenderly processed piano passages, carrying on downstream where they are embraced later by other susurrating details and billowing clouds of sound.
Phillips has an affinity for the basic integrity of the pitches, showing them in stark clarity. With the harmonies, too, he brings the angles and edges of their intervals and timbres into focus. If at times he incorporates a shimmer of spectral dissonance, unearthly ringing tones or delicate knots of steam that turns the surface into a buttermilk sky, it's not in view of mere obfuscation, but to open up something more variegated and pronounced. Phillips has his eye so keenly on his music's microstructure that one feels privileged to be able to lend an ear.
By Max Schaefer
Homepage: Tomas Phillips
Homepage: Koyuki Sound Records
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