Reviews

Last Day Deaf

Bedford, Virginia based composer, pianist, producer, and your shepherd of soft experimental ambient, Micah Pick is set to release his third solo LP ‘Frameworks’ March 22nd. The album is the follow-up to 2023’s ‘Undecoded’ and 2020’s Audiobulb Records released LP ‘Brighter Than I Thought’, as well as a collaborative release with Benjamin Mauch and albums under the moniker American Mythology.

‘Frameworks’ is a pleasure for the ears from the start, although moods and paces shift and swirl throughout the entirety of it. 11 tracks in length, the album is filled with an overwhelming sense of safety and warmth, as though you’re being hugged by the person you love most. The light yet secure feeling of snugness bleeds through and as we begin ‘Frameworks’ with first track ‘Have This Mind’, you find yourself entering a new world, one in which the ceilings are covered in incandescent bulbs, heavy-duty and a bit fuzzy. A microtonal piano was used throughout the album, wrapped in granular processing, analog and modular synths, self-patched filters, and programmed beats. Pick’s process of combining natural sounds with ambient electronics has one feeling as though they’re walking amongst the ocean in a recently developed encapsulated technological device, and his ear for silence amongst the harmony is heavenly. There are certain tones used that strike an almost ancestral chord, whereas others amongst the LP feel fresh, newly found. Sonically it can be derivative (in the best sense of the word) of Aphex Twin, Nils Frahm, Allesandro Cortini, as if at a crossroads between Steve Hauschildt and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. ‘Glacial Requium’ keeps an eternal fire burning, both modestly and decadently, a must-listen. ‘A Moment’ captures your attention for only one minute in time but the combination of fuzz and drone, silence and water-like fluidity, make it memorable. ‘Broken Trellis’ is seemingly regretful, and at times the slightest bit unsettling, whereas ‘Earth Everlasting’ is all comfort and perhaps my favorite track off ‘Frameworks’. ‘Sea Coda’ is the contemplative last track of the LP. As though you’re wistfully thinking of what once was by the seaside, hearing the waves crash in front of you. Sea birds quietly singing in the last few seconds is an ideal way to end such a calming piece of art.

The Blue Ridge Mountain based artist has delivered an album great for intent conscious listening as well as flawless background for your more unconscious moments of the day, so put ‘Frameworks’ on right this instant!

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Igloo Magazine

Imagine music based around the tonal possibilities of retuning a piano. The first time anyone listening might frantically insist that “this is out of tune.” According to ancient tradition, artists sometimes try new things, maybe someone might try to use new languages or somehow create unexpected contexts. Traditionally most sound comes in basic harmonic or dissonant flavors, with lots of variations. There is an itchy feeling as the tones change slightly and do not always quite match up harmonically for that familiar pure sweet resonant sound. The search for harmonic synchronicity is almost happening but is not always there, that is the sound specifically employed here. That matching tone becomes thrillingly close and as the tuner moves the tone as the music proceeds. This creates a wider sense of what you can fit into your listening experience, and perhaps others (besides me) might choose to accept this odd recording as a musical event. It says something positive about using the entire palette of sound available to artists today. Plus the musical listening thrill of surprises and new rhythms that the collage arts have to offer. Perhaps music is a contrived listening experience and we thrill at the emotions that can be evoked and shared.

There are some beats and some engaging rhythms, mostly the feeling is relaxing and has mostly drones. The slow sustained notes of the piano sometimes sound like the tuning is off. The blues idiom shares the bending notes that reach across the normal scale, could that make this music sound almost familiar? Crying as the tone bends. Primarily piano with fanciful collage editing, lots of synths, effects, field recordings, and some percussion asking questions about the nature of existence and what is music compared to birds or waterfalls?

The microtonal sound recontextualizes the familiar sound of the piano. This could be tough on the artist who is doomed to having it pointed out every time that the thing is out of tune. The lesson is that as you listen the more sense and beauty emerge from the warped mystery.

Frameworks is a neoclassical album with elements of electronic and ambient music. Piano with hints of synths, effects, field recordings, and some percussion asking questions about the nature of existence. Mostly what stands out is the artist’s bravery to use a musical language that is built on a piano being tuned, not to the traditional 12 tones of equal temperament, but rather to Just Intonation scales of the composer’s devising and by the end the listening ear becomes acclimated to them, and they are recontextualized by the harmonies to sound warm and inviting to the constant listener.

Curving to match a new normal, “Have This Mind” (4:26) brings mild bending to the tones, the idea of drifting calibration for the notes, a slow piano with flickering synthesizers and crackling microphone noises, perhaps someone walking in dry foliage and strings that explore the bending tones, a form of glitch that provides a delicate sparsity and fleeting moments of dense chaos. Slow down. Take it in. Give up on the sense of “off” and accept the wider range.

The “Glacial Requium” (4:39) furnishes this landscape with more piano microtones and complex textures. Enduring bending notes slightly wavering, the sound of sustained tones reaching into oceans of reverb. The ear can find simultaneous unrelated field recordings, moments of drip and splatter percussion, always playing with the nearness of harmonic normality. Only “A Moment” (1:15), one note alone evolves into very complex bursts of microscopic tones combined with the slowly fading drones. Now to the garden at night, see the “Broken Trellis” (5:12) holding haunting melodic fragments. Soon something start to take form, while something else is leaking out, something polyphonic at a higher speed.

The ear constantly attempts to assemble these “Shapes and Shards” (5:13) bringing from the jumble the piano and muffled electronics that sound orchestral, odd bits come and go whilst the piano sustains drone atmospherics. And suddenly a new pattern pops out, there is a more woven fabric of rhythms and textures, the piano is flittering around like crazy in a structure where the phrases are repeated in reverse order and there might be a passage framed in identical content, “Chiastic Crux” (4:42), feedback and piano collage montages.

“Afterwind” (6:04) I hear morning song birds in the breeze, a piano takes over, with hesitant notes and another form almost emerges from the complex layers of the teasing microtones. A slow fade-in, “Earth Everlasting” (5:26) repeats some of the same haunting fragmented melodies searching for tonic resolution, this time a slightly more solid dream is suggested in the fog. Another collision of elements, the piano and the flickering fields. Dreams do not require or even try to accept any explanation, they just happen. Things start to pick up, then they drop away into the fadelands. “Be Interlude” (1:20) gallops out of the darkness, now we have a cadence and tempo that stands apart, using the established sound library of the album. “Bursting Downstream” (3:33) has a comparatively busy complexity, this is my favorite track. The notes search for the resolution we have craved all along, but the density keeps a steady stream of surprises coming. Bits link with the sonic history here, but a whole new composition rises from the distance and territories we have come through. Triumphant resolution is at hand! The final track, “Sea Coda” (5:57) returns us to the shores of the vast waters, and the piano tuner brings closer the sense of the old normality. Now we have experienced and endured the slowly bending wrong notes and know how all of nature can include some educational flaws. Rain finds all surfaces and penetrates slowly.

Micah Pick is a classically trained musician based in Bedford, Virginia (USA) who works as a collaborative pianist and music educator. 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.

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EKM

Micah Pick brings a unique and captivating blend of neoclassical, experimental, ambient, and electronica music on his new album Frameworks.

A new concept album is coming soon in 2024 by the Bedford Virginia-based pianist, composer, and producer Micah Pick. The album is titled Frameworks and it explores the human ability to adapt to surroundings and situations as well as changing their worldviews and habits as new situations occur. Frameworks is Pick’s seventh album and it follows his cinematic-sounding Undecoded album from 2023 and another concept album of his in It Feels Great but the Planet is Dying from 2022. Micah Pick – Framework is an eleven-track and forty-eight-minute experiment for the listener to see just how they adapt to the environment and experiences brought on while listening to the album. To pull off this experiment Pick incorporates the use of some brilliant composing and producing techniques.

When composing Frameworks, Pick needed to bring a balance of warmth and tension to the music to create an experience that needed adaptation and also had entities that were inviting. The warmth is brought on by the collection of instruments that Pick utilizes in the album which includes a blend of granular piano, orchestral strings, analog and modular synths, and varying atmospheric ambiance. The tension is brought on by the use of non-standard tuning of the instruments as well as the addition of chaotic production effects and stereo panning. A constant tension-building production technique found throughout Frameworks is the use of fast-alternating filters that change a specific instrument or ambiance profile from stereophonic to monophonic. This is a similar effect that you could create yourself while listening to the music if you were to jiggle the input jack of your headphones going into the playback device creating a crackling-like effect.

As the uneasiness of the dissonant instruments, off-centered panning techniques, and the chaotic filters first hit the listener, it is the warmth from the blend of instruments as well as occasional Lo-fi beats and ASMR tapping sounds that keep the listener engaged throughout the album. There are also moments when the original melodies from the granular piano sound as if they were pulled from the Impressionistic period of music and composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. As you make your way through to the end of the album you will find that you have indeed adapted to where the constant tension heard in the beginning is now the norm and is accepted and all it took was the inviting aspects of the music to keep you engaged while your listening habits adapted over time. We highly recommend that you listen to the entirety of Micah Pick – Frameworks in one sitting so you can experience the full listening experiment and the eureka moments that come with it as you realize your listening habits have adapted in the process.

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Tunite Music

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