David Garland | Flowering Flows
(Tall Owl Music)
Any list of under-heralded local treasures must include at the very top Hudson’s remarkably talented David Garland, who has called the region home for many years now. Emerging in the fertile early ’80s Downtown New York scene as a multi-instrumentalist and resourceful composer of wry, postmodern art songs, his work has been complimented by a wide range of parallel activities: magazine editor, art director, writer, and, very notably for fans like myself, a three-decade run as a sublimely eclectic host for New York public and noncommercial radio stations, shifting his exceptional “Spinning on Air” program to podcasting after his retirement from WNYC in 2015. Garland remains an enormously prolific recording artist, and the two-CD Flowering Flows is a compelling addition to his burgeoning discography.
The entire album (less Julian Lampert’s resonant double bass cameo on “The Tonic”) is drawn from tones created by a 12-string acoustic guitar modified by Garland’s son and frequent collaborator Kenji into an engine for sympathetic vibrations—at once consonant and clangorous. Pieces build from silence into multi-tracked layers of pure—and not-so-pure—overtone-rich drones that suggest several early Eliane Radigue electronic works overlaid, although Garland is realizing his sonic architectures acoustically. Sideband melodies abound, harmonies both wide and a semitone or less apart convey a sense of form that’s both monumental and intimate. Pieces like “Undiminished Gift” roar with a thick, enigmatic, and almost metallic intensity. Austere on the surface, Garland’s ecstatic textural explorations on Flowering Flows are as dense, exquisitely beautiful, and occasionally treacherous as a teeming rainforest.
This article appears in October 2023.
