Lynn Avery and Cole Pulice have been collaborators since 2018, first linking up in Minneapolis before hopping to the West Coast to join the Oakland music scene, but they took off on their 2022 debut, To Live & Die in Space & Time. Equally inspired by both Coltranes—John’s beatific overblowing and A Love Supreme’s compact structure, Alice’s ashram-era environments—it was a hit, by ambient jazz standards. It quickly inspired a reissue of Carpet Cocoon, Avery’s early-2020 debut as Iceblink, whose pairing of nylon-string guitar and sound collage turned out to fit perfectly with a Covid-era zeitgeist enamored with field recordings. Meanwhile, the saxophonist Pulice has become a punk grandchild to the Coltrane-Sanders-Ayler father-son-holy ghost equation and put out arguably the best release on Longform Editions, no mean feat.
Phantasy & Reality, the duo’s second full-length collaboration, leans a lot closer to the vision of Avery’s work as Iceblink. Because Pulice has been both boundary-pushing and prolific in the last few years while Avery has released very little, those who’ve followed the former’s career might be surprised by how conventionally lovely Phantasy is compared to Pulice’s pitch-bent odysseys, like 2022’s Avery-featuring Scry. Avery called Carpet Cocoon a “comfort album” to “retreat to during winter,” first putting it out in mid-January 2020 (at the time she lived in Minneapolis, which, unlike the Bay Area, actually has winter). It’s no coincidence Phantasy appears as the days creep towards the solstice, nor that the sun seems to be almost on the other side of the horizon on the album art: This is a cozy record, to be cherished through the dark months.
This time, the reference point isn’t free jazz but the more sedate descendants of that style that emerged on the other side of Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly” in the ’70s. The 2000s work of Harold Budd in particular comes to mind, with the call and response between mournful piano and lonesome choir synth on “Moonlight in an Empty Room” uncannily evoking “The Candied Room” from Budd’s 2000 Atlantic debut The Room, while Pulice’s use of clarinet brings to mind the rosy chamber pieces on Budd’s strongest late-career album, Avalon Sutra. Those wishing Suzanne Kraft had never gone full dream-pop and instead kept on making bleary Balearic fantasies like Passive Aggressive will be delighted by a stretch of songs towards the middle featuring Charlie Bruber, whose upright bass is called on to impart gravitas rather than a rhythmic anchor.
In the time since To Live & Die, Avery moved to New York, and the duo assembled the album through remote collaboration rather than in-person jamming. This is evident both in the song-length tracks (it’s harder to stretch out and jam when you’re working through email and file-sharing) and the wealth of overdubbed detail. A lot more happens minute to minute on Phantasy, not that you’d necessarily notice given the delicacy of the music and its tendency to drift to the corners of the mind rather than firing the neurons. Avery shifts between nylon-string guitar and piano, and her playing on the latter has grown noticeably jazzier and more dexterous in the intervening two years since To Live & Die.
At the center of Phantasy is a regal guest performance from Ambrose Akinmusire, one of the most revered jazz trumpeters of the 21st century, whom the duo met while living in Oakland. “A Mote of Frozen Eternity” sets a crystalline and Christmassy tone with bass clarinet, wind chimes, and a sample of footprints in snow. Akinmusire lets the grit in the corners of his tone morph into laughing jackdaws and roaring lions, finding something dark and biblical in the gardens of Avery and Pulice’s vision. His performance is so mannerist and dangerous it’s like he knows something the other two don’t—that a threat lurks in the thickets of this winter wonderland that only he can sense.
At first Phantasy might feel disappointingly restrained, especially to fans who’ve followed Pulice’s career and might be hoping to hear them push their warped saxophone shapes to unforeseen extremes. But think of it from the perspective of two artists who know the cold, who know how a great wintertime album like 50 Words for Snow or A Charlie Brown Christmas can kick seasonal depression in the pants. Phantasy & Reality won’t become a mainstream holiday tradition, but I could see someone hearing it and not thinking much of it before coming around to it next winter and realizing it’s just what they need to get through those short days and long nights.
