Life Strategies, the 2015 record by Montreal electronic musician Nick Maturo, made one of the most compelling cases for sixteenth-note grids in recent memory. Like a revisionist history of early-1990s ambient music packed into a single LP, its dancing arpeggios and rhythmic flickers of sampled choir gave it a buoyant, fluorescent energy, making it a standout in the vast catalogue of Orange Milk Records.
Vague Definition, its follow-up, released on the Portland-based cassette label Never Anything, trades pulsing propulsion for something more in line with its title. It’s a slightly more introverted affair built on thick, oozing chords and curious changes of colour and demeanour.
The opener, “Poet of Low Wages,” wastes no time blasting into the ears with stabs of expansive murk, but after several minutes the oppressive lushness peels upward to reveal a gentler coda of rich hovering clouds and glittering granular detail, punctuated by soft tolls. The second track offers a clear rhythmic skeleton through what sounds like chunks of sampled guitar, but it ends up being so copiously decorated with twitching filigrees that its intimations of a pulse recede into the background. The stiff, piano-like lick that initiates “Wrecked By Other Means” isn’t enough to anchor the smooth drift, either. The track floats toward a horizon of rubato mist.
Maturo serves up several different flavours of warm, percolating brew on the three ensuing tracks. Their surfaces bubble with rapid filter inflections, kaleidoscopic squirts, and small frothing gestures.
The nine-minute title track starts with chirping flashes of fake piccolo that are soon joined by slurred flurries of voice. Its initial sonic palette and bright upward trajectory gesture toward the world of its predecessor, but this promise of momentum evaporates as the piece tilts toward a series of contrasting perspectives. Built on sustained tones, and distant out-of-phase loops, it’s a peculiar way to end the recording, but one that’s congruent with its overall design.
The tone of Vague Definition seems speculative—willing to indulge in loose ends and disruptions in form. Maturo has taken an intriguing path, and this album’s mysterious shape leaves the listener wondering where it will lead next.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.