Peter Broderick joins the cast of young contemporary multi-instrumentalists who create evocative classically-tinged minimal music with his debut full-length on Type. Delivered is score music for any day.
While relatively short and unprogressive tunes laden with violin, piano, and banjo are something I'm tiring of quickly these days, Portland's Peter Broderick has given me fair reason to not shut these sounds out too quickly. When I received Float, I was vaguely familiar with the sounds Broderick uses. I was expecting to need to find a particularly melancholic time to pop the CD in, so the delicate piano and string arrangements might appropriately accommodate my mood. The opener, "A Snowflake," immediately dashed my preconceptions of what this album was going to be about. Float is most certainly not all gloom. While there are darker moments, a great deal of the music is full of hope.
The narrative quality of the music is what allows it to fit into many spaces. The tone of the record is by no means stagnant, and I found it adjusting to peculiar scenarios. On a particularly breezy day the thick hum of "Stopping On The Broadway Bridge" was wonderfully accented with the hammering of roofers on the next block and the warm air filtering through my window blinds. The fragile yet confident voices on the following track "Another Glacier" were married flawlessly to the rush of skateboards up and down the street. Just as gracefully, the album transitioned between these pieces and into the duo of tracks which add Yamaha Portasound melodies and percussion during the most intense thunderstorm of the season so far.
The playing on Float is competent and understated, and in turn lends itself well to the minimal nature of the pieces. If anything is pushed too hard on this album, it is segmentation of the recordings. As a great deal of the instruments on this album are played by a single performer, and certainly this is going to require a great deal of multi-tracking in the recording process. However, the pieces on Float do not flow together as naturally as they might have; the recordings sound ever so slightly spliced together. This has its positive effects, though, as I have caught myself feeling like I am looking into a different room of a miniature house with each fraction of piece.
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