Like a 21st century version of ‘Nature Boy’? There’s a subliminal power to ‘Purple Dust,’ the most persuasive of the tracks. But there’s an array of choice and certainly this is an album where there’s way more killer than filler.
Come to the album too for top sonics and clever studio work. Tipped, eccentrically typed at dawn by the much put upon site elf, for the top, QED – Eclipse rewards that hunch.
Today release day, me, my elf and I finally got to hear all the tracks and attempt to absorb the ones I don’t know so well from earlier quickly.
The title track ‘Eclipse’ does not disappoint. But as noted earlier and certainly not contradicted by the entirety of the conception, things are just sounding better and better all the time.
‘Chasing Down Lessing Street’ shows a bit of range, the bass lines folded in as part of the mix are communicative and the piece shows an aspect of the duo that I hadn’t really found before. Yes, there is a Lessingstraße in Frankfurt where the dynamic duo hail from.
Fact fans the street is named after the German Enlightenment writer and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) whose Nathan the Wise [Nathan der Weise – natch] was seen according to extensive perusal of Wikipedia as “a fervent plea for religious tolerance.” Amen to that sentiment, right on: as opposed – obviously calamitously and a warning from history in these hideously AfD pockmarked times for Germany, wrong un’s all. What is it they want anyway? Some sort of reich on – going 4th. Very dark times, eh. I wonder why the strasse is significantly up theirs in the duo’s back story.
⚜⚜⚜⚜⚜
Note to self, changing the tone entirely (and I didn’t mention the war “I think I got away with it” [Fawlty]) – sorry about that “note to self” bit. It is becoming more like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Helen Fielding-esque in these parts ever since that evening being Green down the Emerald. I digress (mutters) must find out why Lessing is meaningful.
I suppose such off piste thinking could be worse and go all unintendingly cringey regressing into Adrian Mole once again all awry. “A telegram! Addressed to me! The BBC? No – from my mother. ‘ADRIAN STOP COMING HOME STOP.’ What does she mean? ‘Stop coming home’? How can I stop coming home? I live here!”
The nine-track set follows the duo’s debut EP In a New Order, featured above in an earlier article run on marlbank and continues a partnership that began during the pandemic.
Recorded at Berlin’s Funkhaus Saal 3 additional overdubbing took place at a studio in Offenbach. The album features kaleidoscopic drummer Noah Fürbringer, known for his work with the hipster-ish Moses Yoofee Trio, on the more frantic ravey daveydom tackled on the busy ‘Prism Break.’
‘Interlude’ has an eerie insistence to it that enters an electronica domain at first it seems going to the synths but steps back. And thank goodness for that. The last thing we want now is tired jazztronica.
Instead what sounds like tabla added in by Khadim Seck on ‘Titan’ offers up another vista to an album that has a restless desire to explore new moods and idioms within its basic tonality and the intactness of the duo’s firm identity.
Blair and Huber first met as members of Hessen’s State Youth Orchestra and have played together in other line-ups since 2018.
If you are after groovy riffs you get that too on ‘Gamblin’. Contemplativeness and quiet exploration is the name of the game on the New Year’s day track ’01/01/25′ that pops up at the end. I reckon Eclipse rises to the top of the new Eurojazz list of the year pipping the very different Biréli Lagrène album that’s been there for some time. Read the list in full here.
Final thoughts, this speaks to the soul, chilled and matter of fact. It seems a little apt given this and a bit of latitude to cite another Blair, not a T. but one whose real first name begins with an E. – George Orwell no less – in his classic late-1940s novel 1984 of big brother style prophesy that rings quite true of today’s world, who wrote of Winston Smith the novel’s hero:
But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.”
- Out on Leiter
