Ethan Rose Ceiling Songs (Locust Music)
Portland Oregon-based artist Ethan Rose has commented on his love of “wonderful accidents”, and has already produced several small-run multiples for the Locust label, with “automated musical sculptures” listed amongst his source material. But his compositional hand tends toward order, and there are no Tinguely moments of collapse or dysfunction here: rather, Rose grabs drones and glitches and smears them across a fibreglass canvas, the resultant pieces sounding oddly translucent, and rather lovely. His favourite tactic involves piloting tiny melodies and hesitant phrases through a fogbank of fuzzy, humming harmonics. Not exactly new, but Rose is an eloquent composer, and while his work occasionally catches in the throat, sounding like ambient Eno gone Rugrats, it gingerly negotiates the space between childlike and childish, and happily lands closer to the former. It must be those music-box sonorities: too often a cheap signifier of nostalgia for long-lost innocence, a romanticisation of the pre-linguistic world of the infant by artists hopelessly stuck in denial-of-reality, they’re deployed here with intelligence beyond their usual trite application
Jon Dale
Paris Transatlantic
