Bear in Heaven - Tunes Next Door to Songs
(Eastern Developments)
Generally speaking, the only way to keep an old model for music-making interesting is to continually change the existing structure so that it becomes something new while retaining the characteristics that define its identity. Pop music would have died long ago if it weren't for people who felt the need to resist and subvert dominant ideals in music rather than doom their music to a life of repetition and derivation. These are the kinds of thinkers who will be remembered 30 years from now and while the new EP from Bear in Heaven may not exactly be a potentially historical document, it's certainly worthy of as much praise as anyone might lavish upon it.
Bear in Heaven is Jon Philpot, a musician residing in New York who made up the "analog" half of the criminally underrated and ignored duo Presocratics who in 2000 and 2002 released, on Table of the Elements, two of the strangest and most pleasing discs of experimental music I've heard in quite a while. Presocratics (Philpot and Need Windham on electronics) featured expanded noise and electronic soundscapes coupled with spare and often gorgeous songs, culminating on their debut Works and Days with a straight and unironic cover of Mancini's "Moon River" complete with a strings, brass, harp, and percussion. To say that it's a strange and beautiful moment of music would be a gross understatement. Bear in Heaven, not surprisingly, seems to have taken lush, gorgeous half of the Presocratics albums and expanded his scope somewhat to include slightly more traditional structures, and, in fact, the 4-song EP could be heard as a strange sonata with each track bearing a different section of the classical form: "My Chair" (introduction), "Reserve This Song" (exposition), "Falling Star" (development), and "The Nature of Reality" (recapitulation). While it's safe to say that Philpot wasn't thinking about Beethoven or Mozart when he wrote these songs, it serves as a fitting description for a record that so beautifully does something new and interesting with an age old model: the pop song.
Much of Tunes Next Door to Songs is based on very simple harmonies, leaving the task of creating interest and drama to the music's subtle twists and turns of form and instrumentation. Each new instrument's entrance seems perfectly placed and with the inclusion of a staggering number of instruments and voices (guitar, drones, drums, bass, strings, woodwinds, brass, male and female singing, handclaps, melodica, etc.) the EP exists not only as an example of careful and unique songwriting but also as an incredible achievement in arranging and recording. Given the amount of material and resources Philpot clearly has at his disposal it's amazing the amount of restraint he shows. At no point does any song sound overblown or overproduced; rather, each song seems to have been given exactly what it needed, no more or less than necessary. Similarly, he easily could have included more than four songs but instead chose restraint, releasing these four songs that function so perfectly as an independent musical idea. It's criminal that this EP has, for the most part, been released completely under the radar of almost all music listeners. Do what you can to find it.
Eastern Developments, if you're reading this, it's impossible to find this CD. How about a little distribution for one of the best CDs to have been released this year?
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