If the word “stream” hadn’t been so normalized by how everyone listens to music these days, it would be exactly the perfect word to describe Matt LaJoie’s new album. In both its effect and its creation, the gorgeous new Everlasting Spring is streaming. The music feels like an afternoon by a slow-moving creek, surface reflections peacefully changing with the light. Across four one-take improvisations on 10-string acoustic guitar run through a delay loop pedal and reverb, LaJoie’s extended pieces ripple and cascade, grow intricate, and thin out again.
As co-proprietors of Brunswick, Maine-based Flower Room Records, either LaJoie or his partner Ash Brooks have been participants in each of 39 releases they’ve put out since 2017. Between the custom cassettes based on star charts and Bandcamp shots depicting tapes next to crystals, it’s tempting to fold LaJoie and Flower Room’s output into some corner of the New Age revival. But not only does LaJoie display commanding technique on Everlasting Spring, he also evolves his creative voice. There’s nothing raw or folkie about Everlasting Spring—it might be more accurate to file LaJoie’s solo playing under American Progressivist.
There is a lightness of step behind LaJoie’s loops. It’s celestial without being sleepy, and rarely stays still. During the 13-and-half-minute “Showers Over Birch Point,” LaJoie plays in several modes at once to create the sensation of multiple currents. Occasional muted notes on the bass strings make slow ambient bursts of rhythm, mid-range harmonic dots follow at their own pace, and LaJoie solos gently on the highest strings. All accumulate to keep the piece in motion. The 16-minute album-closing “River’s Breadth” is slightly more minimalist, building to a quiet conclusion, in which LaJoie juggles two lead lines, one fast, one slow, each gorgeous.
In part because of the improvised nature of the music, and in part because of Flower Room’s prolific release schedule, there is the sense that one could wander away from the label and new records would just spring eternal without ears to hear them. Dipping further back into the Flower Room’s catalog, LaJoie’s earlier solo releases over the past two-plus years do sound like the same mood altered slightly, depending on the weather. But that underlying source, LaJoie, is the core of these ever-changing permutations throughout the rest of the Flower Room catalog. And while Everlasting Spring is atmospheric, it’s not necessarily background music. It’s proper foreground company, an album to hang out with and fill the room like any other. As blissed-out as Flower Room’s total output is, it changes session by session, moving somewhere between mountain and ocean, with a long way yet to go.
