Slow Six - "Nor'easter"

Slow Six - The Pulse of This Skyline With Lightning Like Nerves (New Albion 2007)

Slow Six - Nor'easter / New Albion

When the fireworks end, you've passed all the police checks out on the backroads, and you're safely home in one piece to recover from a long day of revels, Brooklyn's Slow Six will be waiting. In fact, they've been waiting for quite some time: The group has been around in one form or another since 1998 and they've been performing together live since 2000. Their debut LP, 2004's Private Times in Public Places, was a hailed masterwork of sounds meshing post-rock with the classical and producing something delicately detailed in between. You can ask "Time Out New York" or Stylus or WFMU, but they'll all tell you the same thing: This is some deeply touching music well worth your time and effort.

As the magnificent opener "The Pulse of This Skyline With Lightning Like Nerves" immediately demonstrates, the group has not lost its way or gunned for a dramatic reinvention. The spokesperson for the group has turned out to be Greenpoint-based Christopher Tignor, who has built his own studio there and tweaks a variety of instruments from electric guitars to violas. However, it's the digital aspect that has most captured the eye of live attendees and critics alike: By taking his knowledge of SWARM (SoftWare and Algorithms for Running on Multicore), which is a programming framework to speed up the efficiency of processors (I think), Tignor has designed music software personalized for his own needs in Slow Six. So when a violin or a piano is played, Tignor cleverly weaves the sampled bits back into the song as a sort of efficient reprocessing of his own. The effect is nothing less than totally organic.

It's a generally downbeat air on Nor'easter, but these songs don't come without their optimistic moments. The quietly drawn-out "Contemplation and Dissolution of An Idea for Two Pairs" is full of hope and a keen sense of contemplation as its title would suggest, but the piano lines during the course of the dissolution are almost angelic, like what you'd expect to hear as you ascend to the pearly gates. Or, alternately, it's what The Rapture would've sounded like if they'd taken a bigger hint from The Bible. Tension on "Distant Light, Part 1: Chromatic Clouds Surround" is relieved during the course of its nine minutes. "Distant Light, Part 2: Now New Colors Fall Like Rain" ends on a positive note.

These pieces are another fantastic outing for the Brooklyn six-piece and though it's likely I won't have the opportunity to see them live anytime soon, you should go experience Slow Six for yourself. Their music can be haunting, it can be thoughtful, it can be soaring, it can be resigned... But it is always good. If you thought you couldn't listen to classical beyond the obvious choice cuts from Wagner or Beethoven, Slow Six is a great excuse to delve back into orchestral music. Brilliant stuff.