CD Feature/ Crowell, Doles & Quinn: "Don't Look Down"

Opens up in all points of the compass

What’s in a title?. Often, it can be of no significance at all - when Filter released “Title of Record”, the entire music press dove into the band’s history in search of clues or hints (it was later revealed that the grafic designer had sent back the file with the cover and left a blank field where the “title of the record” was supposed to be inserted and front man Richard Patrick had simply not come up with a reply until the date of release). With “Don’t look down”, its title is more than just a name.

DAC Crowell interprets it as a mysterious scrible in Kurt Doles’ notes, a term that appeared out of nowhere and suddenly demanded attention. The reason this made sense was that, everyone indeed seemed to look up in preparation of and during the sessions leading up to this release: Crowell had travelled to Japan twice within a few months, recording the noises and vibes from the streets, which would later turn up in the bizarrely plodding “Dusk Moments” and the dense and energetic street semblance “Kami to Isshoni Yodooshi”. It also fit in with the trio’s meeting, which meant a long journey for Doles inside the USA and an even lengthier flight for Quinn, who boarded the plan in Scotland and exited in Illinois. For certain, it might refer to the dynamics and the free flowing jams that followed and which saw the musicians engage in spontaneous improvisations and an entirely free exchange of ideas and sounds. But most important of all, it is a perfect description for these six compositions, roughly between nine and fifteen minutes long, which, by their airiness, optimism and organic nature defy all previous concepts of “Ambient”. As a matter of fact, you’re better off not thinking of this term at all. These are uplifting, dreamy, solemn, drifting and harmonic instrumentals that open up in all points of the compass, stretching their branches to reach for the sky. And they all circle around the album’s core, a slowly dripping piano meditation called “After the Wind”, which sees several melodic layers take on new formations with each cycle.

In the last twenty minutes, the record breaks up the dense ambiance in favour of more concreteness – a welcome change and again a move to avoid going too deep “down”. So, let’s come back to the initial question of what’s in a name. In this case, it’s programmatic and powerful, pushing listeners deeper into the sounds, helping them discover whole new layers of meaning hidden behnd the surface of the music. And it’s an excellent introduction to a sublime first effort by this eclectic trio.

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