Marsh, Alex

Marsh, Alex

Trellis

Not Not Fun

After almost a decade of exploratory ambient activity under other aliases, Australia-based musician Alex Marsh presents their first eponymous work: Trellis. The title refers to the music’s “triple-woven” palette of autoharp, upright piano and an old Yamaha keyboard, arranged in diffuse configurations of fragrant smoke and sunlit dust. Accented with clarinet, chimes, bells, and cymbals, the pieces breathe more than build, pooling and dispersing in what Marsh describes as “horizontal ecosystems of sound.” The album’s mode of improvisation feels uniquely open and indeterminate, guided by a careful alchemy of tonal color and the resonance of interacting sound layers. Wisps of keys bloom and bend in the mist; strings thrum and glow; hushed vibrations stretch like clouds in a quiet sky. In both muse and method, Trellis embraces blurred boundaries and unseen forces, tracing small sonic moments into a yearning mosaic of suspended animation