Justin Walter - Lullabies and Nightmares

[takeshi]

From Boomkat:

Chicago-based trumpet player and electronic experimenter Justin Walter makes a lovely debut appearance on Kranky with his rarified first solo album. Sounding uncannily like the results of a secret hook up between Golden Retriever, Arve Henriksen and BoC, on 'Lullabies & Nightmares' Justin employs the Electronic Valve Instrument - a sort of hybrid trumpet and analogue synthesiser created in the '80s - to gorgeous effect, improvising frothy, fizzing loops of languid melody and scorched dissonance overdubbed with blunted drum patter and fractured electronics. It's all miles off Justin's previous work as session player for the likes of Iron & Wine, Nomo, or Sinkane, and much the better for it, allowing his mind to really wander beyond any generic restrictions and frame the instrument and Justin at their most free, intuitively expressive, creating a genuinely lush, naively wide-eyed sound that just happens to dovetail with the sweetest sides of Ghost Box, the sacred forms of Kyle Bobby Dunn or even an energy-depleted Colin Stetson.

 

From Justin:

I set out to record an album of completely improvised music that fused my experiments with the Electronic Valve Instrument and my love of held sounds on the trumpet. In recent years I've come to see the trumpet as an instrument that speaks in slow and long sounds, with meaning coming from the shape and inflection of each note. The process for this was fairly straight forward, record lots of improvisations. Of the songs on the album, six are one-take improvisations with the only overdubs being drums. The remaining five are multi-tracked improvisation, meaning all elements of the song were first take improvisations. Nothing was programmed in a computer, everything was sampled live. This was the key part in the process of recording this music, providing the necessary structure needed to follow an idea to its end in real time.

Lullabies and Nightmares:

1. Mind Shapes
2. Dream Weaving
3. Awakening
4. Lullabies & Nightmares
5. Western Tears
6. Fears of a Wild Man
7. The Way of Five
8. Plastic People
9. Thoughts
10. Sister Sleeper
11. I Saw Your Face

 

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I'd never heard of this guy before but I checked it out just because it's on Kranky and this is really good. He creates some really beautiful tunes.

[Berk]

yeah great release, needs more love!!

[Berk]

 

deserves a resurrection spell