Rob Burger — Marching with Feathers (Western Vinyl)
Rob Burger has played all kinds of instruments in his life and career, electronics and guitar, pump organs and synthesizers, banjos and music boxes, but it all started with the piano. In Marching with Feathers, the composer returns to his home base with nine tracks that include many varieties of tone and drone, but center around the piano.
Burger has worked in a variety of contexts and ensembles, from major studio film soundtracks (he composed the music for Ocean’s 8), to John Zorn’s Filmworks series, to the experimental traditionalism of the Tin Hat Trio to a longstanding partnership with Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. His most recent album before Marching with Feathers, The Grid, pulsed and percolated with electronic energy. Its title track buzzed in shadowy dissonance, a rough friction grinding against dreamlike Krautish propulsions. The new record is just as mysterious, just as lovely but more organic.
“Waking Up Slowly” scatters ghostly, Satie-like keyboard simplicity across hallucinatory arcs of pedal steel (that’s Paul Niehaus, by the way). It stirs to sentience gradually, its parts whirling in a slow motion dance. “Hotel for Saints” is more emphatic, blasts of synth sound swelling around staccato piano motifs, a hard backing of drums keeping pace. “Still” is heartbreaking and distilled to essence, a melancholic piano drifting in from another room. And the title, “Marching with Feathers” splices unruffled sound washes with glitch beats, setting limpid pools of mood in motion. A string section warms up as the piece gains density (Teddy Rankin-Parker is credited with cello), and layers of tone shift on and over one another. A march implies purposeful forward progress, feathers soft sensuality and adornment; the piece merges both in a meditation that moves.
Still, the cuts that pare back to just piano (or mostly) wield the quietest kind of power. “Figurine”’s soft rounded notes float in like a dream of a memory, right there but also out of reach, with transience, mortality and regret in their slow progression.
