Tidal Perspectives - Giovanni di Domenico, Pak Yan Lau and John Also Bennett

“The unstoppable John Also Bennett returns with 'Tidal Perspectives', teaming up with Giovanni di Domenico and esteemed sound artist Pak Yan Lau, combining their shared ideas into a glistening, oily pool of prepared piano, Rhodes, woodwind and triggered oscillations. ‘Tidal Perspectives’ is an album that refernces New Age synth canon, but also the work of classic minimalists like Philip Glass and Éliane Radigue, comfortably drifting from tempered tonality into skewed, ancestral oddness. It's exploratory but warm-hearted; experimental music that feels so close you can almost touch it.” - Boomkat

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Tidal Perspectives is an album by Giovanni Di Domenico, Pak Yan Lau, and John Also Bennett. Recorded across a single afternoon in Brussels, Belgium, the album’s four parts are a rippling alchemy of processed Rhodes piano, sizzling ceramics, and liquified bass flute, a rare meeting of three unique voices from the contemporary music landscape that manages to flow with the effortless inevitability of the oceanic tides.

Giovanni Di Domenico, an accomplished composer and prolific collaborator who has released albums with Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi and Akira Sakata, among many others, initiated the collaboration with Bennett after the two met at a record fair in Saint-Gilles, Belgium and bonded over a shared inquisitiveness for unconventional sonic combinations. Along with Pak Yan Lau, a Belgian-born sound artist and improviser who has developed her own rich and unique sonic footprint, the trio entered the studio with little, if any, discussion beforehand, jumping right into playing without preconceived structures. The resulting recordings had a depth of sound and emotional resonance surprising even them, with finished pieces emerging from single live takes and minor edits.

Bennett, known for his solo work as well as his collaborations with Christina Vantzou as CV & JAB, gives us here a taste of his bass flute in free flowing form. Unconstricted by concept, joyfully and lazily bouncing off the melodic shimmers of Di Domenico’s Rhodes, Bennett uses his flute’s pitch information to trigger long tones that emerge like rays of light piercing through low hanging clouds - moments of clarity among a clicking world of sonic stimuli. Meanwhile, Lau’s crackling and sometimes dissonant contributions on prepared piano, live hydrophone, and custom ceramic sound objects balance out the triangle, adding a sense of microcosmic intrigue that allows the music to seamlessly ebb and flow between moments of comfort and foggy uncertainty.

The album’s title track and climax, the eighteen minute “Tidal Perspectives”, drifts in with some kind of clarity, Lau’s glinting tonal waves edging in just beyond the horizon lines drawn by Di Domenico’s Rhodes and Bennett’s bass flute. But like the tidal flows of the Atlantic that inspired its title, just as you begin to perceive what’s happening, the currents have already taken you out to sea. 

John Also Bennett - Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2

“Mind-nourishing and atmospherically luxe, 'Music For Save Rooms 1 & 2' is a fine example of how video game music can cross brazenly into the avant-garde.” - Boomkat

John Also Bennett (JAB)’s Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2 compiles two volumes of minimalist music “meant to color the atmosphere of a room in which you can stay a while, but that you will have to leave in the end”. Recorded across five years, the music was initially conceived as a set of infinitely looping and morphing compositions for conceptual “save rooms”, temporary safe spaces within video game maps. Music for Save Rooms 1, released digitally in 2020, has been definitively mixed and expanded, and is presented here alongside Music for Save Rooms 2, a second album of music stemming from the same original sessions. Save Rooms 2 differs from its predecessor - instead of a collection of disparate works centered around a theme, the album presents a narrative, a tour through the mind’s eye of an artist searching for an elusive place, somewhere in the open world of our collective consciousness. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.