For lack of tidy genre placement, Baltimore composer Jonathan Badger achieves something like chamber ambient, only laced with serpentine electric guitar. Having studied composition and scored his share of theatre and dance pieces, Badger turned to computer-aided recordings on his 2006 debut album Metasonic and this wavering follow-up. He recorded various string, piano, and vocal parts to create a huge bank of samples to pull from when playing live, only to use them in the improvisational process of creating this album.
Between those manipulated sounds and a full stock of Mellotron tape loops, there’s a slippery quality to Unsung Stories…. Its more placid moments recall a subtle score, but it changes direction too often for that comparison to hold. After a rollicking start on the first track, the following ‘His Face Like Glass To The Touch’ lives up to its delicate title, albeit culminating in spidery guitar licks. Badger works through some creepy twitch and glitch on ‘Neurosmith’ and later enlists burping, stuttered piano on ‘The Insight That Comes From Repeated Time Dilations’. His work can feel overly repetitious and off-the-cuff at times, but that’s the nature of such destination-unknown experimentation.
Doug Wallen
*
