The musical partnership of Dave Harrington and Benjamin Jay, a duo that calls itself Lights Fluorescent, may seem completely disjunctive. Harrington, best known as one half of Darkside, with Nicolas Jaar, has built a pedigree as an improvisatory guitarist with an avowed love for jam bands and a deft way of reframing jazz history for his own ends. Benjamin Jay makes house music, most famously with Benoit & Sergio, although his work with occasional outfit NDF expanded into more explicitly experimental terrain. Jay’s contribution to dance music has always been idiosyncratic and deeply human: He sings about loving girls who never apologize, hating DJs who focus too much on “color frequencies or resonance,” and following your principles.
Along with his impeccable phrasing, this slanted yet highly credible lyrical perspective is the principal sliver of Jay’s previous projects that survives in Lights Fluorescent. A drum-free record, their debut, The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons, locates itself far from the dancefloor; the lyrics inhabit a nostalgic, obliquely confessional mode that, along with the heavy electronic soundscape, points toward something like chillwave. “I’ve been listening to Neil Young,” sings Jay on the standout track “Neil Young/Cues,” voice splitting the difference between nasal and husky as he completes the thought: “Those Baltimore afternoons.”
Once a PhD candidate studying Renaissance literature in the aforementioned city, Jay sings like a grown son only just understanding that his Another Green World references (on the powerful “Palace Walls”) might age him out of being a kid. Harrington uses his guitar more sparingly than fans of his sprawling—both in size and ambition—ensemble the Dave Harrington Group might expect. Yet even if the skittery, allegro, electric-Miles sensibility Harrington fostered in his band is apparently absent from Lights Fluorescent, strong traces of his previous work remain, particularly his liberal and creative use of feedback. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons demonstrates the growth of Harrington the producer, not Harrington the jazz musician.
His embrace of the studio, paired with Jay’s always evident, albeit still nascent, ability as a pop singer-songwriter, make for a surprising, successful alchemy. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons is a clinic in how to pace an album’s rhythms without using drums. Synthesizers are employed consistently yet simply, hugging tightly to chord changes. The feeling of tension and release is bound up in whether the keys—and the occasional structural bass, as on the short and sad “Epitaph”—provide a pulse, or if they serve to deepen the duo’s sense of texture, like most of the instrumentation. The record’s forays into traditional musicianship are illusory: The spiky, bright guitar line on the title track is a loop, and unlike Harrington’s jazz-fusion predecessors, whose studio embellishments were often hidden beneath a heap of instruments, the sparsity of Lights Fluorescent’s compositions does little to conceal their means of production.
Some may point out that the duo looks backward musically, and certainly aspects of its sound will be familiar to anyone who surveyed the synth-happy surfaces of early 2010s indie. Yet the trajectory of the two minds behind Lights Fluorescent suggests that this project is one lucky meeting in a couple of long, omnivorous careers. Jay has decided to scale the introspective scaffolding that buttressed the dancefloor mantras of his past. Harrington, like a number of artists who cut their teeth in the jazz world—John Zorn and David Torn among them—has furthered his understanding that working in the amorphous genre of jazz fusion entails fusing with the innovations of the present, even when that means leaving jazz behind entirely. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons is a fusion few would expect, which finds its makers comfortable together: on the near side of experimentation, and on the far side of pop.
