Much like their restless, searching music, the career arc of Brooklyn's Christmas Decorations has traced a crooked path. Formed in 2001 by Nick Forté and Steve Silverstein, they released their Kranky debut Model 91 a year later. It featured simple, looping songs made mostly with guitar, bass, and the occasional left-field vocal. The fertile music suggested much more to come, but four years passed before the arrival of a follow-up, the meditative Land of Nope (part of the Melted Mailbox subscription series). Having become an all-instrumental trio with the addition of Peter Kerlin, Christmas Decorations had evolved greatly, incorporating a wider variety of sounds and sources into their bubbling mix.
Last year a third album, Communal Rust, expanded their palate further, adding glitchy electronics in the vein of Markus Popp or Christian Fennesz. Far Flung Hum, the group's first release on their own label, is another step forward. It may not be a huge advance in sonic terms-- most of the sounds here are similar to those on previous records. But it's the first time that Christmas Decorations' thoughtful alchemy has felt so natural. Patient and highly textural, these six songs are more like growths than compositions, as inevitable as vines creeping down an old brick wall, or weeds sprouting up through an untended garden.
Like those slow-moving phenomena, each song builds gradually and almost imperceptibly. Opener "Rosin Slip" veers from folksy string plucks to scrapes, slaps, and buzzes that seem random, but coalesce into a mini-symphony. The rattling "Turning Into Birds" creates a rickety rhythm out of watery burbling and kitchen-sink percussion. Imagine the minimalist sound art of outsiders like Jeph Jerman or Sean Meehan transformed into a Tom Waits-style junkyard stomp. Far Flung Hum peaks with "Broken Leg Hours", a rumbling, densely atmospheric piece. Rummaging through shortwave-ish beeps and outdoor ambience, the group makes deep space transmissions and chirping field recordings sound like twins. It's as if they decided to craft a planetarium soundtrack by recording the stars from a moonlit porch.
Maybe these pieces are destined to accompany films, preferably time-lapse footage of nature along the lines of Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy. Just as Reggio paired Philip Glass' chiming minimalism with cars whizzing by and escalators pushing the masses, it's easy to imagine Far Flung Hum married to shots of flowers blooming, ice crystallizing, and bacteria multiplying. Either way, the hypnotic quality of natural growth is already there, embedded in Christmas Decorations' transfixing sounds.
