The idea of an album that aims to explore the relationship between electronic music and the creation of the universe comes across as heavy-handed, ponderous, and more than a little silly. It’s a relief, then, that Here Comes Now, a collaboration between the Trinidad-born saxophonist and theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander and the Brooklyn electronic musician Erin Rioux, only fulfills that last expectation. It’s light-hearted, fun, and on occasion, very silly.
Much of Here Comes Now takes the form of electro-powered free jazz, and as a whole skips merrily by—a listener could be forgiven for not recognizing the album’s core concept (which is driven home by a track named for Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time) on the first few spins. But Alexander isn’t a dilettante in either of his fields: he received his physics doctorate from Brown University and currently holds an associate professorship at Dartmouth, and he also considers music, particularly improvisational jazz, an important element of his academic pursuits.
Rioux's propulsive, cheery beats give the album its momentum. The music mostly races forward with gently twinkling synths and drums, punctuated by long saxophone solos and short riffs. Perhaps the most involved example of the duo's sound comes on the xylophone-incorporating “I Guess We’re Floating”. It features Arto Lindsay and possesses a great chorus, which takes the shape of an elongated appeal to keeping faith and letting go.
The silliness on Here Comes Now mostly comes from the lyrics, which tend to take the form of mantras: “I just want to be the person that I am in my mind,” “The light in you, the darkness in you/ It’s all precious.” These clichéd sentiments can grate, but they’re also reassuring to hear emanating from someone as smart as Alexander. The album’s other weak spots come when Rioux and Alexander fail to balance each other out. There may be a grounding scientific concept that helps to justify the existence of slower, sax-heavy tracks like “Running from the Cosmos” and “Ornette’s Vortex”, but their presence hurts the record’s pacing and threaten to relegate it to the realm of background music; Rioux’s influence is less obvious on these tracks, and the music suffers for it.
But even if Here Comes Now doesn’t always hold the listener’s attention, it is extraordinarily pleasant as background music. Alexander investigates big questions for a living and the finesse he shows here, in tandem with Rioux, allows the duo to ably sidestep expectations and deliver an album that fulfills the promise of its concept.
