The music of Justin Walter veers between nebulous and numinous, coaxed from the translucent tonalities of his signature instrument, the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument). Destroyer, his latest, and third for Kranky, marks his most multifaceted work yet. Inspired by minimalistic urges (evading grandiosity, condensing scope, embracing spatial restraint) tempered with the drama of triptychs (becoming, destruction, aftermath), the album’s eleven tracks thread a keening suite of aching, opaque beauty, traced in absence and breath. First begun in the the no man’s land summer of 2020, Walter gradually amassed nearly two hours of demos, drafts, and ideas, then steadily whittled them to their essence. Destroyer enlists the sounds of a recently restored pump organ, adding pulses and quaking texture, but otherwise the album is a shimmering showcase of the EVI: miasmic, melodic, intuitive, infinite. It’s music of fraught devotion and uneasy peace, questing yet languorous, forever rapt and untethered.
LP $22.00
10/13/2023
Michigan trumpeter Justin Walter’s solo work centers on evocative, intuitive explorations of the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument), a rare wind-controlled analog synthesizer from the 1970s. Its unique, smeared tonality allows for an expressive range of glassy, jazz-like textures, which Walter loops and layers with hushed electronics and twilit trumpet, painting opaque landscapes of resonant beauty.Walter’s 2013 debut, Lullabies & Nightmares, included a handful of collaborations with percussionist Quin Kirchner, but Unseen Forces finds him fully solo, refining the project to its essence: shape-shifting watercolors of pastel haze, lit by the soft synthetic glow of electric breath. It’s a sound both modern and timeless, fusing emotion and technology, gauze and melody, force and fragility.
LP $19.00
04/21/2017
CD $16.00
04/21/2017
***The debut album from longtime NOMO member JUSTIN WALTER. If this was a vintage Nonesuch label release, it would come with some dry title such as Music for Electronics, Trumpet, EVI and Percussion. The recordings here are anything but dry, instead being an exhilarating interface of the human and machine. “I set out to record an album of completely improvised music that fused my experiments with the Electronic Valve Instrument and my love of held sounds on the trumpet. In recent years I've come to see the trumpet as an instrument that speaks in slow and long sounds, with meaning coming from the shape and inflection of each note. The process for this was fairly straight forward, record lots of improvisations. Of the songs on the album, 6 are one take improvisations with the only overdubs being drums. The remaining 5 are multi tracked improvisation, meaning all elements of the song were first take improvisations. Nothing was programed in a computer, everything was sampled live. This was the key part in the process of recording this music, providing the necessary structure needed to follow an idea to its end in real time.”—Justin Walter (STREET DATE - 5/28/2013)
LP $19.00
05/28/2013
CD $16.00
05/28/2013