For those of us in the northern hemisphere, September is a strange month that finds summer on stage while autumn waits patiently in the wings. The sun is destined to cross the celestial equator on the 22nd or 23rd, after all, and cold is guaranteed to eventually take hold. This we know. Yet the transition is rarely smooth. Many Septembers of my youth found me sweating in classrooms, just as the Octobers of my middle age have heaved leaves onto the lawn along with heat and humidity typical of July.
Matt Bachmann delves into the choppy changes of life via the 10-track Compost Karaoke, a mostly instrumental outing that weaves together elements of jazz, classical, and—to borrow from the press release—“bedroom chamber music.” In a sense, it’s the score for a nonexistent art-house film. (For those unfamiliar with the term, such movies find adults grappling with adult issues and not the cartoon conflicts that accent most of today’s fare.) In Bachmann’s case, he traded the touring life, including playing bass for Mega Bog, for a career in social work.
The press release quotes him as explaining, “I had been so inside the music world that I had become blind to its generosity—the way it brings us together and allows us to collectively feel, dream, and escape. Making this record was a lifeline—an opportunity to put my sometimes isolating earthly work aside, and dream a bit with friends.”
For the outing, his fourth for Orindal Records, he gathered many of his longtime cohorts, including Derek Baron (Reading Group Records) to arrange the woodwinds and play drums; Jeff Tobias (Modern Nature, Sunwatchers) to play alto saxophone and bass clarinet; and James Krichenia (Big Thief) to play hand drums and percussion. Also present are Kyle Boston (guitar, tuning forks), Cory Bracken (vibraphone), and Roberta Michel (flute).
The album opens with the push into fall via “Summer’s Last Gasp” and “Autumnal Cycle,” with the former accented by a storm of instruments and the latter a tad more airy, leaning as it does on a minimalistic Japanese-influenced motif. One can easily imagine both as the soundtrack to a movie’s opening scenes, perhaps paired to an older sedan leaving a busy city and winding its way up a mountain road, a lone driver at the wheel. “Heavy Step” maintains the laidback vibe, while “Jazzy Mateo” marks the arrival at an emptied-out resort, which I see as scattered cabins in a woodsy environ. “TIAGDTD,” which abbreviates the Klingon phrase “Today is a Good Day to Die,” returns tension to the proceedings, while the brief “Holy Holy Holy”—the first track with vocals—releases it.
The jazzy title track revisits the storm of “Summer’s Last Gasp,” while “Out the Door” finds our main character out for a stroll in the woods, gleefully unaware of the many dangers that lurk in the trees. (To borrow a line from Wallace Stevens, “what we think is never what we see.”) “Dark Flute Reprise” finds him atop a cliff, agog at the beautiful valley it overlooks. The album closes with the second track with vocals, “Long Road”; Bachmann possesses a grainy timbre that’s pleasing to the ear. One can easily imagine the tune overlaid on the film’s final scene: said sedan winding its way down the quiet mountain to bustling civilization.
Sometimes a glimpse of beauty is all we need to make it through winter.
The Old Grey Cat 