Brighter Than I Thought
Micah recontextualizes the familiar sound of the piano by processing it with a modular synth. This creates a swirl of electro-acoustic landscapes. Each track was recorded in one take where the synth processed the piano improvisations live. Courage, Dear Heart uses the 2hp Pluck synth voice and What We’re Fighting Against includes the Make Noise 0-coast, otherwise, all other musical sounds on the album have the piano as their sole sound source.
Tying the musical elements together are snippets of field recordings Micah captured during his everyday life to amplify the emotional themes of the album. These themes explore the surprise at finding unexpected joy even at our darkest moments when our worst fears are realized and facing the unique stresses of adulthood by retaining a sense of childlike joy.
Gear used: Mutable Ears, Reflex Liveloop, Mannequins W/, Pico dsp, 2hp Verb, Bastl Cinnamon, 2hp Pluck, Make Noise 0-coast, Ornament & Crime, Shakmat Modular Bishop’s Miscellany, Make Noise Function, and Make Noise Optomix. Tracked and mixed in Ableton Live.
Credits:
• Performed, Recorded and mixed by Micah Pick
• Mastering by Taylor Dupree at 12k Mastering
• Album art by John Wilcher
Special thanks to Benjamin Muach, Gregory Vinson, Mackenzie Nehring, and Ezra LeFluer. Dedicated to Lucy, Adrienne and Bronwyn, the givers of great joy
Tracklisting:
- You Know When You Hear It
- Open Up The Sky
- Into The Mountain
- Courage, Dear Heart
- What We're Fighting Against
- Match In The Night
- Towering
- Joy As A Sword
- Shooting Star
Micah Pick
Micah Pick is a classically trained musician based in Bedford, Virginia (USA) who works as a collaborative pianist and music educator.
ReviewsNow Then
As music minister at a Baptist church in Virginia, Micah Pick's first and only other release is a series of hymns. But Brighter Than I Thought, out last month on Sheffield's Audiobulb Records, looks beyond the congregation.
The nine-track album draws from a unique style of minimal ambient to varying degrees of success. Notably, it follows the pared-back approach mastered by LA-based musician Emily A. Sprague in its simple combination of field recordings and piano processed through modular synths. Typical of Taylor Deupree's 12k imprint, this is a style that foregrounds subtlety. The blips, crackles and whirrs of 'Into the Mountain' best represent this on Pick's album. It's no coincidence Deupree mastered both Pick and Sprague's recent releases.
The less subtle bits hold things back, like the cliched opening 'You Know When You Hear It'. The sound of a train fading into serene piano coaxes out the album's escapist theme but with some awkwardness. Elsewhere Pick treats this with estimable delicacy. The voice recordings in 'Open Up the Sky' and 'Shooting Star' fix you in their present, like good ambient always does.
But, as ever, it's not all pleasant euphoria. 'What We're Fighting Against', a volta of sadness, marks a divide in perspective between past and present.
Where the first half of the record overflows with childish escapism, the second resolves this gloomy half-time reminder by adapting earlier themes. We've seen this structural divide before in JQ's INVISIBLE on the now defunct New Atlantis label. But with its more playful exchange of moods, Brighter Than I Thought proves the more interesting listen.