Paul Beauchamp - Grey Mornings

Paul Beauchamp - Grey Mornings

Verdict: 4/5
Label

Boring Machines

CATALOG NO

BM078

RELEASE DATE

March 24, 2017

Written By

Gabriel Leașcu

Published

August 9, 2017

‘Musical compositions can be very sad but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognized that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.’ Umberto Eco

Lover of both, distress and long meditations, anger and kaleidoscopic mind states, Italian label Boring Machines delights us with an enchanting schwebend drone release. Composed while living in the birthplace of Umberto Eco, the Piedmont region of Northern Italy, Grey Mornings is American born Paul Beauchamp’s second solo album that seems to have come out of his need of expressing and deconstructing the ecological sensitivity humans’ involuntarily posses; in this case, during foggy, cloudy, Mediterranean mornings.

Even if knowing the producing background might be somehow limiting, the semantics of each composition’s title and their order can suggest multiple interpretations depending, of course, on the listener’s surroundings and present mood. While I repeatedly listened to it in my dimly lighted room, outside was raining and the city life way too embedded in my body’s cellular memory, thus the soundscapes I was hearing were invariably embodied oblivious to its creator’s initial motives.

Gloomy at times yet not disruptive, it had a very soothing effect on me, accurately described by U. Eco in the quote above. Especially when it was in synchronicity with the motorik rain drops, which were hitting the metal sheet of my balcony. His previous, highly acclaimed among connoisseurs, solo album Pondfire, had a more minimal approach, but in this one, Paul Beauchamp, with the help of sound engineer Julia Kent, experimented with field recordings as well as different acoustic and electric instruments, creating layered homogenous compositions that can go on a loop for hours and hours without them becoming too familiar.

Tracklist:

1. Condense
2. Craw
3. Tendril
4. Dissipate
5. Enclose
6. Drift
7. Haze
8. Settle
9. Murk