anagrams: blue voices

Together, JD Walsh and Jeff Crompton are Anagrams, and their debut album Blue Voices might initially seem like a departure from Balmat's habitually electronic terrain. It's not ambient music, but it's also not not ambient music, at least to listeners in the right frame of mind. On Blue Voices, Crompton plays alto and tenor saxophone, clarinet, electric piano, and organ; Walsh lets his experimental tendencies take the lead. Playing acoustic and electric guitars, electric lap steel, bass, Moog Matriarch, modular synth, and programmed drums, he concentrates his energies on richly textural layers and abstract assemblages of tone color. Across the album's 11 tracks, there are faint echoes of familiar touchstones: the atmospheric twang of Daniel Lanois' pedal steel; the mercurial modal runs of Ethio-jazz; the late-summer calm of Fuubutsushi; the versatility of players and composers like Patrick Shiroishi and Sam Gendel, who are asking similar questions about where jazz ends and some other, nameless territory begins. Mostly, though, what Blue Voices captures is the quixotic sound of two restless musical imaginations making it up as they go along, two voices discovering a shared language in a hitherto unexplored shade of blue.