By Brian Earley
A single string vibrates into one deep, sustained note. The note
flickers, almost pulses around its tonal center, the way a Tibetan
singing bowl circles one ever changing tone.
This is how “Sheep Water,” the fourth song on Tunnel Vision, by
Brian Marsella and Sae Hashimoto, opens.
After nearly forty seconds of this single string emanation, four
high-pitched notes seemingly glow into existence out of the opening
sustain. Soon, a quiet clatter– air passing through different length
reeds? –a metal spatula clacking along a turning bicycle tire?-
stutters its way forward.
The string is from the low register of the inside of Brian Marsella’s
piano, bowed with a shoe lace or some object that must resemble one.
The glowing notes and bicycle tire? The vibraphone of Sae Hashimoto,
played first with nearly complete resonance and almost no attack at all,
and then hit with direct percussion, as her sticks clank over the outer
face of the instrument’s metal resonating tubes.
It feels like floating through a dark but weightless corridor.
“Blurry-eyed and dizzy,” like the feeling of tunnel vision, is how
Hashimoto explains the way she felt while working late into the night
with Marsella on this new mesmerizing album. I could spend the entire
review on “Sheep Water” alone, so wonderful it is, as it floats freely
through atonal rubato before collecting itself some four and a half
minutes into Hashimoto’s composition with an impressionistic
alternating piano line and a hushed conversation between the two
instrumentalists.
While much of the music on Tunnel Vision is chamber music
tranquil, the work is filled with ambitious and off-centered percussive
rhythms. Listen, for instance, to Marsella’s composition “S.O.S.
(Mayday! Mayday!).” The rhythms here splatter like paint thrown
unpredictably at a wall, opening with three splashes from the piano in
mid, high and low registers, followed by three hits on the vibraphone
bars, the first patiently held out, the final two playfully rushed
offstage as the duo embark on a six minute adventure that is as
exploratory as it is fun.
Much of this lovely album exists either in the dreamtime realm of
rubato ballad melodic lines that quietly insist on remaining unresolved
(“Seeing Behind the Bald Cypress Tree,” for example) or whimsical
percussive play (check out “The Centrifugal Force That Keeps Us Intact”
for this side of the record).
The work is also visually evocative, and I am so thankful the Bandcamp
page includes a video of the two musicians working their way through
Hashimoto’s title piece with Brian using a piano that is partly prepared
to stop its strings’ resonation dead flat, while Sae fires out
impossibly accurate off balance rhythms. And balancing out the rhythms
of life is central to this recording in unexpected ways as well. The
album notes on Bandcamp tell listeners this:
Sae’s 34-week pregnant belly made it difficult for her to stand for
extended periods of time, and the vibraphone was further away than
usual. However, feeling her son kick throughout the session, she
knew he could hear and feel the vibrations of the music.
How cool–how beautiful–is that?!?
Tunnel Vision is a wonderful album filled with
compositional ambition and avant-garde experimentation. It too is very
beautiful, and I highly recommend checking it out.
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