Collaboration is the spice of creativity, as well as life. Of course being in a room alone with just your ideas, musical instruments, and a recording device can also be a completely satisfying experience, but when you can bounce ideas off of another creative mind there’s nothing more exhilarating. Having a like-minded soul building upon ideas and creative paths you’ve begun is like bringing imagination to life. There’s nothing quite like it.
That is precisely what happened on the collaborative record Tree Grid from ambient musicians/producers zakè and Coppice Halifax(Zach Frizzell and Brian Grainger.) On Tree Grid zakè sent loops, textures, and sounds to Brian Grainger and Grainger assembled them into thoughtful, dreamy tracks. It’s as if Grainger created sounds out of thin air, or from the thoughts and dreams of zakè. It’s the perfect record to listen to on a crisp fall walk, or for a contemplative sit down on the front porch. These are introspective musical sketches that keep you captivated and invested throughout.
You can almost imagine what these songs would have sounded like prior to Coppice Halifax adding his magic to them. Slow moving, melancholic, and absorbing soundscapes that put you in a place of meditative, yet lucid transcendence. What Coppice Halifax seems to have done is give these amorphous textures a beating heart, making something like album opener “Canopy Opening” or “Old Growth” into moving, kinetic tracks. Going from ambient music to something more conducive to movement. These feel like dance tracks for cosmic journeys.
“Pines In Summer Static” has an almost Aphex Twin quality to it, while the indulgent optimism of “Section Line” gives an almost Boards of Canada feel via Twoism. These subtle rhythms and beats give the album an overall sort of Warp Records in the 90s mood, and I’m here for it.
If you’re in search of a perfect fall mood kind of album, get lost in the green forests of Tree Grid.
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