The fleet evocativeness of the playing that characterised Broderick’s first documented foray into solo piano remains and spills over onto other realms on Float. Over the course of the album, Broderick ascends a ladder and makes nods to ambient and folk music. They don’t appear as tentative wild-card interventions or involuntary accomplices, nor are they included in view of a particular end, be it an ideal conviviality or a state of fusion. Broderick works these elements into myriad simpatico combinations – perfectly synchronized and dynamically subtle – while not dissolving their individual force and fulguration.
The basic control of dynamics, if anything, makes the effects more dazzling. Intricately patterned intervals of melodic piano fragments on “Another Glacier”, interspersed with long single notes of violin and whirling ambience, egg each other on towards increasing deluges of stirring density. Much of the rest of the work deals in precipitous mood pieces. Safe though exemplary passages for a small clutch of instruments (piano, violin, cello, computer), which often make for a smooth, stimulating tissue of sounds. Not the most visceral or vertiginous of approaches, but nonetheless absolutely compelling and by no means robbed of life-force. Its intimate, introspective atmosphere is ruffled and kept shifting by an elemental directness. Bathing in its quiet, unaggressive language is thus as easy and refreshing as letting one’s sight be swallowed by the blue of the sky.
Max Schaefer
