The Japanese group Minamo plays tiny, dulcet music for guitars, keyboards, and light electronics. Australia's Lawrence English, the owner of the dreamily experimental Room40 label, shares Minamo's knack for pastoral understatement, though his solo music relies more on ambiance than instrumentalism. This collaboration took place in the ether between Tokyo and Brisbane, with English shaping Minamo's instrumental sketches with a toolkit including harmonium, field recordings, and electronics. While it seems like new nice-enough collaborations between niche electro-acoustic artists come out every day, A Path Less Travelled rises above the pack. The two years of work that went into it are evident in its patient cohesion, not to mention its flat-out gorgeousness.
Between the placid beauty of Minamo's disarticulated tunes and English's harmonium and bass, the music courses with warmth. Birds sing on "The Path", crickets chirr on "Headlights", and water splashes against a dock or boat on "Springhead". (Birds sing in 99% of pastoral electro-acoustic music and seldom receive any royalties. English's use of crickets and water is more striking: The former add a subtle Reichian pattern to a nocturnal melody, while the latter kick-starts the rest of the track's liquid swirl.) The drones are fat and windy, the instrumentation spindly and bright, creating a well-balanced sound mass that banks through prismatic timbres and textures. Each track builds toward the merest intimation of a climax that really arrives only with the final song, "Fireworks", a hard-strummed anthem that feels earned after all the delicately shaded moods.
So, okay, an ambient-ish record evoking the great outdoors-- it doesn't exactly sound like press-stopping material. But A Path Less Travelled offers an unusually microcosmic perspective on that scenario. It's less like being swept above nature from a bird's-eye view than sitting still in your yard all day, sinking into a heightened awareness of how much happens in all that apparent [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| stillness, from the constant fluctuations of light and temperature to the shifting sound profiles of wind and animals. Instead of the mountain and the river, we get a little stripe of sunlight on the lawn, and it's plenty.
