Aluminum Overcast

Editorial Reviews
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Anyone who found Chas Smith's previous CD as extraordinary as I did (my review appeared in the March 2001 issue) will delight in this new release. The earlier disc was the most outstanding of a trio of remarkable CDs by different composers, issued to mark the rebirth of Cold Blue Music, a label previously lauded for its support of the so-called new California School. Not least among the fascinations of Chas Smith's music are the instruments themselves, weird fabrications of gleaming metal, designed and made by the composer. Like old friends with fanciful nicknames, many of them are back for the latest recording, along with a few new ones. Greetings, then, to Copper Box, Adkins, Mantis, Bass Tweed, Junior Blue, DADO and Guitarzilla (who are on occasion supported by the pedal steel guitar, flutes, other winds, cello and voices.)Where the earlier disc, 'Nikko Wolverine', was a collection of diverse pieces, Aluminum Overcast is a 50-minute work in six movements, conceived rather like a set of variations and a coda. Of course, there's no 'theme': what we need to hear first is disclosed in the opening section, 'Uncovered the Nest'. Long pedals unfold in slow procession, each of a different colour and pitch, each sustained until the struck or bowed tone decays, many marked by clarion overtones. 'Gate 5' is more intense, reworking those ideas in a kind of stretto: pedal entry-points are closer together, so that the pattern of their interconnections starts to be heard as melody. The process of tightening continues in 'A Wasp on her Abdomen' and yields a greater degree of overlapping, a thickening of the tonal spectrum and richer, denser textures. This becomes, in 'Rubric of Green', a slow pealing – but not so much of bells, or pitches, as of colours. 'Aluminium Overcast' is the last variation, and it gathers many of these features together to produce a sense of profound harmonic sonority, in a sort of Adagio that finally – wondrously – resolves into a static chord that simply hangs in a timeless space, and eventually fades to nothing. One is left wishing it had stayed. But that's soon satisfied: the final movement (also the longest) picks up where the previous one ended, and inhabits a sonic dimension of unbroken radiance, always focused, always static, yet constantly stirred by inner coruscations.The piece is a journey that calls to mind not just Harry Partch, but at times also Webern, Feldman, Messiaen, Ligeti, the Orient – all recast into an original and quite mesmerizing sound-world. Inspired maverick though he surely is, Chas Smith nonetheless occupies a place within a history, and within particular traditions. A booklet might have explored such issues, or even given some information about the composer and his amazing menagerie. But Cold Blue doesn't 'do' booklets. And that, as before, is a matter for regret. Christopher Ballantine

The Wire
"Like one of Ligeti's impenetrable clouds of clustered vibrating particles."

Aluminum Overcast