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Further developing on the ideas behind the album Pearls, Allen returns with his latest offering, Still. On this release we discover beautiful dream-like sounds which seem to hover as they gently flow through textural transitions and subtle melodic evolutions. Like a calm lake, the four works presented in this collection are reflective, slow moving, detailed and complex. Meditative atmospheres contract and expand, inhale and exhale, while melodic lines float, fold in on themselves and reemerge in a natural cycle of organically-inspired digital music. As with his previous works, Allen once again applies his endless interest in the spontaneously ordered structure of nature, and delivers sound-worlds which evolve while remaining static and reflect while remaining silent.  Reviews: Fluid Radio, Nathan Thomas It would be easy to start talking about the sea again, but that’s not it. Closer would be the discrepancy between the tiny and the vast: the unusually-shaped rock noticed the moment before a panoramic vista, for example, or an ocean contained within a particular inhalation of seawater scent. “Art is not the imitation of nature,” wrote Adorno, “but the imitation of natural beauty.” So the whole of it fits inside a single resonating note. Or spreads to fill an entire spectrum of sound. The title “Still” would imply a moment in which nothing happens – nothing except the moment itself, perhaps. A kind of frozen movement, a dialectics at a standstill (to abuse Walter Benjamin’s phrase). So it is sometimes more useful to think of these four tracks as paintings or photographs, each with a beginning, middle, and end that occur simultaneously, rather than following a linear path of progression. The question moves from one of listening to one of looking, from “what do you hear?” to “what do you see?”. And of course there is the whole issue of form, of whether nature could be said to have form or whether it is simply random, whether we impose our our impressions of form upon it or whether the appearance of form is nature appearing as nature through us. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of “Still” is the way in which form appears as something that emerges out of the music itself, rather than being imposed upon it from the outside. Individual elements – chiming, hissing, marimba-like or brittle – are encountered seemingly by chance, yet the whole is cohesive and complete, having a clear wholeness to it. This is the nature of sand dunes and snowflakes, patterns distilled from orderless components (because it is still true to say that sand knows no dune!). This is not the imitation of nature, but the imitation of natural beauty – not the imitation of an object, but of a certain process of appearing or happening. Cory Allen’s last album “Pearls” was highly regarded by many, and the release of “Still” should only further enhance his reputation as a maker of intelligent, perceptive, beautiful music; fans of Marcus Fischer’s “Monocoastal” and other recent 12k releases should find Allen’s work slotting nicely into their collections. Currently there seems to be a wealth of new music being released that engages creatively and imaginatively with nature and the productive tensions between the organic and the digital, and “Still” places Allen among the leading lights of this movement.
The Liminal, Scott McMillan On Still, minimalist Texan artist Cory Allen continues the excellent form he showed on last year’s wondrous Pearls album. Once again, on opening track “Shutter Echo”, beautiful shapes (in the form of slow, woozily-processed keyboard notes) emerge into focus from amongst audio fog, with before slipping once more into the darkness. Allen has a real talent of making sound that you can almost see and feel as well as hear, and as the album progresses, that fog becomes more intense, with the levels of static and granulation becoming so coarse that they seem almost tangible, as if you could reach your hand out and scoop a handful of grains of sound from the air. The tiny flecks of guitar in the background of “Goodbye Ghost” are powerless to stop this, like flinging teaspoons of water at a forest fire. Life returns to the forest on closing track “Ascension”, with its recordings of exotic birds high up in the canopy, before an uneasy stillness returns at the album’s end. After repeated plays of Still, I remain a huge fan of Cory Allen’s work.
Still, Cory Allen's follow-up to the early 2011 release Pearls and 2010's Hearing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Hears, would be as natural a fit for 12k as Allen's own Quiet Design, given that the release exudes the same kind of meditative ambiance and fine-tuned sensitivity to textural detail that are hallmarks of 12k's releases. True to form, Still feels very much as if time is standing, yes, still in the recording's four settings, such that, paradoxical though it might be, the album's material manages to exude static and developmental qualities in equal measure. “Shutter Echo” introduces the album on somewhat of an alien note with the slow-motion swirl of cavernous whirrings, fuzz, flutter, and other grainy noises until the comfortingly familiar presence of an electric piano arrives in the form of sparse and meditative meander—the effect a little bit reminiscent of the way in which Robert Wyatt's piano humanizes Eno's ambient colourations on the opening piece of Music For Airports. The presence of what sounds like amplified vinyl crackle gives “Goodbye Ghost” a suitably spectral character, as if the ghosts of recordings past have been exhumed and re-awakened. That surface texture also resembles the kind of ambient ripples one hears at the seashore, which in turn lends the piece an open-air expansiveness that's present to a lesser degree on the other pieces. “Goodbye Ghost,” one of the two most densely textured settings, could pass for a processed field recording taken at an early morning harbour, where myriad creaks and rustlings meld into a muffled whole. Real-world sounds intrude to an even greater degree during “Ascension” when the overlapping bell tones of various clocks and the utterances of creatures overshadow the melodic elements. Still isn't without its darker moments, either, as shown by the second half of “Becoming” when the threat of an oncoming storm spreads itself across the track's droning flurries. Throughout Allen's thirty-seven-minute collection, the material develops in accordance with a natural and fundamental logic, much like the development of an organism through time. There's an unhurried feel to the material as it moves through its mutating stages, and its generally relaxed drift induces a corresponding sense of calm and thus heightened receptiveness in the listener.
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Tracks: 1. Shutter Echo
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