Personal note on the music​

from pianist and composer Christian Li

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"Matthew Halpin plays a burnished antique saxophone and hauls cords of wood by hand at his family’s fixer-upper castle in the Irish countryside.  He once rode across the entire United States alone on the back of a motorcycle.  He spends an inordinate amount of time writing and recording joke songs, which he plays for unwitting friends after a few rounds of drinks.  He doesn’t post about any of those things on social media.  Those of us closest to Matthew have long been fortunate enough to have our lives ornamented, and occasionally walloped, by this 21st century hobgoblin.  I am pleased to inform you, dear listener, that you now have the chance to see what all the fuss is about.  

 

I am going to be honest with you.  I am a recovering musician, having been thoroughly demoralized by the formalist rigmarole of music education and the inscrutable artifice of image culture.  I have not been able to bring myself to sit down and listen to so-called “jazz” (to use the critic’s term) for over a year now.  Occasionally, I’ll catch a faint whisper of Lester Young or Bill Evans somewhere off in the distance and find myself practically in tears, reminded of the singular potential for beauty latent in the 0’00” of every record I’ve ever loved.  But mostly I avoid it.

 

When I put on Matthew’s record, I felt like a kid again, lying on the floor of my parents’ living room, dreading the moment when a song would end and practically begging for the sound to stretch on into eternity.  Matthew and his crew of musicians - Kit Downes on organ, Hanno Busch on guitar, Sean Carpio on drums,  and Sergio Martinez on percussion - contain multitudes.  They expand and contract. They maneuver hairpin turns, impossibly.  They interact with biotic, kaleidoscopic intricacy.  It’s thrilling.

 

The result is a captivating glimpse into Halpin’s vertiginous inner life.  On “Dancing with the Devil,” Downes’s organ shrieks above the fray as the band builds into an orgiastic, Hieronymus Bosch-like frenzy.  On “To Do,” the same organ soaks a retrofuturist fugue state with planar surfaces and hallucinatory colors.  Martinez and Carpio propel “The Beach” forward with a groove that is both relentless and weightless, dotted with the scintillating light that reflects off the water on a perfect summer day.  In “Treetown,” Halpin and Busch remind me of the Brooklyn mockingbirds that have learned to imitate car alarms - the natural struggling to adapt to the material.  This piece recedes into R. Murray Shafer’s jungle, silent in the wake of destruction.  

 

Perhaps most breathtaking is the album’s final track, “Sleep,” which features singers Veronika Morscher, Laura Totenhagen, and Rebekka Salomea Ziegler.  They sing a prayer masquerading as a lullaby:

 

Sleep beloved.

May your sleep be sound and

Silence all the world’s alarms.

Time, unwound.

Time, unwound.

The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,

For the foul winds blow.

Everything outside us is wind and snow.

 

Around them, the band spins a diaphanous, ghostly fabric of nocturnal sounds - muffled footsteps, an analog clock, a draft that sneaks through a crack in the window and billows the curtains, the Cagean sound-silence of dark space.  Yes, everything outside us is wind and snow.  Thank you Matthew for giving me somewhere safe to rest my weary soul.  It’s a place I never want to leave."

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