gabriel saloman: movement building vol 3

Shelter Press has present the third and final volume of Gabriel Saloman's Movement Building series. For fans of Saloman's post-Yellow Swans work -- an already dense catalog of darkly cinematic compositions mostly conceived as accompaniment to some of Vancouver's edgier contemporary dance companies -- Movement Building Vol. III is not only a much anticipated conclusion to this trilogy, it is the most fully realized album in years. Whereas Movement Building Vol. and Vol. II acted primarily as documentation of time-based artworks, Movement Building Vol. III offers a more coherent and narratively rich album that will appeal to admirers of Soldier's Requiem. Listeners will recognize the emotive bowed strings, militant percussion, and searing guitar eruptions that evoked memory and trauma in that previous album. Joining this pallet are other familiar Saloman sounds: shoegaze washes of distorted guitar, minimalist piano attacks, melancholic appregiated melodies, and a patina of harsh noise. Added to this is a more 21st century approach to drums and bass, perhaps an effect of his collaborations with producer Michael Red in their dub ambient project Chambers. Saloman's music has never sat comfortably in any genre, sharing with a select cohort of other artists (Stephen O'Malley, Lawrence English, Grouper, Kreng, Tim Hecker, among others) an ambiguous position between "modern classical", "electronic music", and the more outer limits of metal. Movement Building Vol. III doesn't clarify as much as it expands Saloman's oeuvre further into an idiosyncratic musical no-man's land that fails to be faithful to any popular musical trend -- contemporary, retro, or futurist. Movement Building Vol. III's themes are taken from the dance it was composed for, 2015's What Belongs To You, created by long-time collaborator Vanessa Goodman. That work sent its dancers through a physical journey exploring the needs of the body, for shelter, for love, and for self-actualization, roughly aligned to Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs". Though this record was recorded in 2015, Movement Building Vol. III could be the perfect album for the current era of civilizational near-collapse, whether at the hands of maniacal politicians, the slow burn of the Anthropocene, or the constant enclosure of the corporate-driven, social media enabled surveillance state. The collection of these works allows one to see clearly Saloman's techniques and approaches to a relatively limited number of instruments -- guitar, percussion, occasional piano, and tape.