A Paean to Julian Lage - On the release of Nothing Happens Here and Speak to Me
This morning Julian Lage dropped a new track on YouTube
https://youtu.be/oSRvSS-87-g?si=allH7onAkV5KFMxT
Nothing Happens Here
I set out on my walk planning to listen to it but I heard just the first notes before I realized that since I was not subscribed to YouTube I would have to keep my phone out and awake, so I decided just to listen to it when I got home, but those first few notes got me thinking about Mr. Lage and his Voice...
Channeling a Nino Rota in Fellini film score. Compare La passerella d'addio from "Otto e mezzo"
What other fractal neighborhoods could he find? As a guitarist as a musician He is like a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
To say that he's eccentric is just to mistake that he's not concentric, confined to convention, the center is just to say the foci of his musical ellipse proliferate in the elliptical ellipsis... Lessor talents drive a stake into the ground and hold on to it. Fearful of dissipation.
Where's his voice? It reverberates in the space where he resides.
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I wrote the above but, either I chickened out or the comments were closed when I went to post it. Below was the comment I posted on the date of the release of the album Speak to Me with some of the ideas from above still in my head but I'm not sure I remembered I had written them down here.
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With apologies to G*d, Mr. Lage's musical offering is like a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. To complain of the catholicism of his taste is to privilege the conventional concentric at the expense of the effulgent fecundity of his eccentricity. The foci of his musical voice are in a higher dimensional ellipse... of the human voice, the narrative voice, of technique always in service to musicality. When I first heard the first few notes of Nothing Happens Here, I thought of Nino Rota, popping out of a bottomless sack of stories. What's next? A modern metaphor for the range of his sources is Generative AI: he consumes the entire culture to generate a profusion of novel permutations, but in his case imbued with an ineffable and inimitable humanity. Being an acoustic guitarist my early favorites were drawn from World's Fair, but my taste and knowledge has grown with exposure to each new project. When I saw him an Chris Etheridge I got annoyed with the audience hollering each time one of them would play an amazingly fast clean phrase, as if it was a sporting event. What I valued most were those parts of Worlds Fair where the mic picked up a sudden inhalation, literally an inspiration, not at a technically difficult point, but one of deep emotion. There's his voice.
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