It’s no secret that albums are getting longer, but Jonny Nash prefers concision. He has said that his favorite format is the mini-LP: 30 or 40 minutes long, one piece of vinyl, not too many twists and turns. The format is particularly conducive to home listening; it’s the right length, he finds, not just to set a mood, but to immerse the listener in the artist’s “sonic world.” He likes the format as a musician, too: as a vehicle to explore a specific idea or a temporary obsession.
So far, his Melody As Truth label has been geared along exactly those lines. Modest in sound and scope, yet unusually committed to its cozy parameters, the Amsterdam label has, in its three-year run, dedicated itself exclusively to quiet, contemplative ambient experiments by Nash and his friend Suzanne Kraft (aka Diego Herrera, a former Los Angeleno now also based in Amsterdam). Each release so far has offered a snapshot of a process or a mood. Nash’s 2014 EP Phantom Actors was a set of limpid new age studies for synth and piano that could have been mistaken for a lost Mark Isham demo. The following year, his Exit Strategies modeled itself upon the liquid guitars of the Durutti Column and Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. Kraft’s 2015 album Talk From Home, meanwhile, tackled airy synth-and-guitar miniatures, while last year’s masterful What You Get for Being Young used similar sounds, just fewer of them, and ended up being as evocative, and elusive, as the scent of a crisp autumn morning.
Following a split 7” and a split cassette, Passive Aggressive is the duo’s first collaborative album, but it’s not immediately obvious that it’s the work of four hands instead of two. If anything, it is quieter and more spacious than anything either musician has done on his own. It sounds as though, instead of encouraging each other to add more ideas to the mix, the two musicians focused their energies on subtracting everything extraneous. The results appear as effortless as Japanese calligraphy: a constellation of gestures in which no motion is wasted, and so seemingly natural that the creator’s hand disappears behind the work.
The pair recorded the album in a week of sessions last summer; instead of their usual array of hardware synthesizers, they opted for software-based tools. They have described their desired aesthetic as “future-ECM,” a reference to Manfred Eicher’s iconic jazz and contemporary-music label, in which empty space and suggestive textures are often as important as melody or rhythm. There’s certainly something to that characterization, though the music’s restraint has even more in common with the hushed margins of Editions EG’s catalog, not to mention the Italian minimalist Gigi Masin, who plays with Nash in the trio Gaussian Curve. The more melodic songs, like the bookending “Photo With Grey Sky, White Clouds” and “Time, Being,” suggest Talk Talk muting most of the channels on their mixing desk.
The palette is limited to slowly unfurling synth pads, a liquid trickle of piano, and, most intriguingly, a stubby sound that uncannily resembles an upright bass, except slightly too perfect to be the product of mere wood and catgut. In “Time, Being,” Nash contributes some of his characteristic clean-toned guitar; in “Small Town,” a backmasked filament reminiscent of Robert Fripp flares up. They like to dribble soft staccato attacks over watery backdrops, and they prefer melodies that slip ambiguously between major and minor keys, opting for seconds and fifths over thirds. It all conjures ambiguous, open-ended moods that accommodate a listener’s own emotional state rather than enforcing one of its own.
To call Passive Aggressive placid would be an understatement. It is an album of profound tranquility, and in its modest ambitions it can seem almost slight at first—not just ambient music, but Ambien music. Still, heard on good speakers in the right frame of mind, its meditative miniatures come springing vividly to life. Taken together, this entrancing 40-minute listen amounts to a core sample of a mood you can’t quite put your finger on, which only keeps you drilling ever so gently deeper.
