After recording alone at Sylvan Esso’s studio, Westerlund had associates like Califone’s Tim Rutili, saxophonist Sam Gendel, and violinist Libby Rodenbough make their marks, drawing out the songfulness of his pitched percussion and digital washes—his kaleidoscopic mills of hand drums, shakers, metallophones, thumb pianos, flutes, subject recordings, and so forth. To name it a percussion album in all probability offers the fallacious concept of austerity and depth, when the music is admittedly pushed by its clear density and uncanny efflorescence of textures and colours. It’s vivid and thrilling within the method of techno, although dancing to it might be a path to madness, and it’s stunning and delicate within the method of live performance music with out taking itself fairly so critically.
For all of his evident technical capacity, Westerlund’s music appears most involved with vibe and really feel, and every monitor on Curiosities offers us a special solution to understand which means in movement. “Nu Male Uno” is moist-eyed like Animal Collective, draping a swaying theme over a sashaying ant-line of little pulses. “Peebles ’n’ Stones” is an array of seemingly disparate elements—unwinding clockwork, essayistic constructions of combined percussion, glassily shattering piano phrases—inextricably linked like falling dominos. “Can Tangle” distills a knack for coating candy, tiny songs in glittering scales of rhythmic and timbral elaboration.
There are nonetheless many surprises to return—the dubby noir of “Persurverance,” the computerized scramble and galumph of “Furahai,” the perfumed Italo splashes of “Midpoint,” and the mighty churn of “Elegy (for OLAibi),” which begins in sinuous reverie and ends in rapture. All through his work, Westerlund makes beats really feel much less like unilateral traces and extra like huge webs vibrating with sympathetic reactions—percussion as ecosystem, not the bulldozer plowing by means of it. This strategy, rigorous but versatile and fluid, has a pure synergy with the clave on Curiosities From the Shift. Although clearly born out of strenuous research and energy, it’s a simple and charming hear, which is the essence of his beneficiant, endlessly generative strategy to music.
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