Writing reviews are quite challenging and very patient at times. You have to see and hear if an album will click with you or not. I remember watching a rare ‘90s educational video on YouTube of the late great Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times explaining on what a good movie review should be. “You have to play with your reader.” He says, “You have to give the movie its day in court. There has to be something in there that conveys what the experience is like.”
With albums, depending on which genre it is, you need to be fair with both the reader and listener to see if it sinks or swims. You don’t want to just blast the music in a horrible way that would make them think, “No way in hell I would buy that piece of crap!” It has to be a reason to convey a lot of reasons on what the album was like from beginning to end.
My experience with Jon Durant and Stephan Thelen’s Crossings released on the Alchemy label, is like a road trip to the unknown. Whether you get it or you don’t, you have to give the duo a lot of credit by taking us to a journey away from the craziness between the pandemic and the political outside world.
Recorded last year from April to November during the lockdown, between Portland, Oregon, and Zürich, Switzerland, Crossings is an ambiguous release this year. I feel like I was inside a movie that was brought to life with an ominous score with Thelen and Durant’s dialogue explaining what is happening in a city that’s about to collapse.
You feel the howling winds coming at you for its next cold front approaching as Durant makes his guitar cry in the middle of a heavy snow storm. But when Thelen uses his loops and effects on his instrument, it is like a clock ticking non-stop. Most of the compositions are straight out of the misty mountains from Terje Rypdal, Robert Fripp, and Manuel Göttsching.
It has these intensive scenarios that just grabs your heart with a lot of energetic beauty. Sometimes it will send shivers down your spine as the snow has hit the mountains by dropping below 24 degrees. The Ice Storm, it sure is heavy as hell. And it can become a ghost town at times.
You can imagine yourself being in a car, driving down the slippery ice, not knowing when the danger will come at you in a manner of seconds. The temperatures can go up in the last three sections as they head deeper into the electronic caves with echoing reverbs. But mixed in some crossed over vibes between CAN’s Future Days and Cluster’s Sowiesoso, I just wished that both Durant and Thelen had made Crossings as a double album.
I wanted to hear more from them as they continue the story. While Crossings took me a while during the summer, it grew on me more and more. And each time I would find something special, it’s almost as if the duo had given me more pieces of the puzzle to get them all in the right section during the heavy times we’re living in.
It’s not just an experimental album, but a calm during the heavy storms that we badly needed.
