Big Bend

The anticipated follow-up to Big Bend’s acclaimed Radish (2019) is about longing to listen. Let’s begin outside a studio, where primary songwriter Nathan Phillips is on a house painting job. He overhears the band Ex Eye rehearsing inside. A muffled sound reaches him, through one closed door and then another. This proof of distance, measured by sound, inspired Last Circle in a Slowdown.

Phillips, who lives in the rust belt town of Mansfield, Ohio where he grew up, returned to live recordings of ensemble jam sessions he hosted at a residency in Australia. In a process similar to his collaborations with Laraaji and Susan Alcorn on Radish, Phillips collaged the residency sessions, this time alongside co-producer Shahzad Ismaily.

The result is a hifi celebration of the instrument in its purest form and a dimensional testament to the possibilities of composition: Violin and saxophone court flute and bass harmonics on a foundation of drums and moog newly layered by Ismaily, along with acoustic guitar, piano, and bass. Anna RG came in at a late stage to reassemble and hoist up the arrangements.

The album’s title evokes the full-circle nature of that process. But Last Circle in a Slowdown refers specifically to the final rotation of a table fan, that incremental reach toward stillness. We can apply that to decay, or disrepair. But Phillips and his collaborators remind us that, when recast and reversed, that slowing circle becomes momentum and beginning.

These sounds feel at once live and deeply considered. Phillips’ structured to free-form singing grounds an impression of rich 90s acoustic rock and an influence of the British post-pop songwriting of Mark Hollis and David Sylvian. In the lyrics we meet the moon and see through the window of a moving train; we consider the opening and closing of a heart. Phillips’ writing seems to process the looming chance all things could move in any direction. At the center is a longing expressed by astronomer Maria Mitchell: “We can reach forth and strain every nerve,” she says, “but only seize a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.”

- Lyndsay Knecht (Red Hot Org)