The thing that caught my eye in the press about Breathing Landscape was that it was recorded "in an abandoned water tank in rural northwest Colorado and inspired by Muriel Rukeyser’s circa-1935 poem of the same name". That is a formidable bit of description. Violinist Leslee Smucker is formidable too, and the sounds here -- stark, bracing, and eerily precise -- are compelling.
Opener "air placed formally" is as much about the silence between notes as it is about the notes being played. The sounds stretch out, and there's a faint echo around them, but there's something needle-like about their place in the piece. In "beneath this still hand" Smucker somehow makes her instrument sound like a mass of violins. The tone is impressive, and there's a force, like a wave on a cold beach, that carries the piece towards the attentive's ears. Elsewhere, the glacial peals of "in briefest transit" are punctuated by the scraping strings of the same instrument.
Smucker does so much here with such a simple premise that what seemed on paper an ominous proposition is an engaging one. Breathing Landscape glides into the legacy of minimalism but it's a record full of brash precision, one punctuated by flashes of an almost percussive force from the violin. Uniquely created in a specific environment, the album works through a cool combination of location and musician. In other words, to make it plain, Smucker is playing not only the violin, but the acoustics of her environment.
Breathing Landscape by Leslee Smucker is out now via Beacon Sound. Details below.
[Photo: Michael Ash]