(((O))) : Joshua Van Tassel – The Recently Beautiful

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Joshua Van Tassel has been making a name among the artists who apply their classically-based musical skills to a more ambient setting.

So far, Van Tassel has worked with larger-scope ideas like a sci-fi folk tale, or a custom score for craniosacral therapy. His last outing was Dance Music Volume II from 2020, but for his new project, The Recently Beautiful, Van Tassel has gone for a seemingly smaller concept – lullabies for adults, arranged for a quartet, written at night while the rest of his household slept.

Yet that ‘seemingly smaller concept’ does not sacrifice anything in either the complexity of his ideas or the music itself – the only possible sacrifice you could think of here is the fact that Van Tassel has limited his compositions here to anywhere between one and three minutes in length.

And while to some it might seem like an easier thing to do, it is actually a harder thing to do, particularly when elements of classical music are involved, ‘regular’ modern or post-modern, makes no difference. Simply, you have less time available to present complex musical ideas, and only the most capable and inventive artists are able to surmount such an obstacle successfully.

Listening to The Recently Beautiful you realise that Van Tassel has both the capability and inventiveness to present such complex musical ideas in a very short time span, which is quite a feat actually.