There is a lot to process on Andrew Cloninger’s new album, “Brutalist.” Processing, in fact, could serve as the guiding concept behind the album. Song titles like “Archive” and “Field Notes” suggest raw sonic material of various sorts underwent a careful process of refinement, sifting or even distilling.
Instead of clean, repeatable melodies and chord progressions propelling songs forward, the Canandaigua artist lets simple melodic fragments, riffs and drones weave together and congeal into tape-saturated textures. That’s not to say this album is high on polish — the opposite, in fact.
Recorded to four-track cassette, “Brutalist” is a drone-ier, noisier take on lo-fi recordings like Arthur Russell’s “World of Echo,” but also more fleshed out, instrument-forward than William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops.” It resides somewhere on that wonderful tape spectrum.
For instance, if you were to take any of the ghostlier instrumental sections of “Nebraska” — Bruce Springsteen’s accidental entry into the genre — loop it, cut the speed in half, crank the echo and gently jam over it with various instruments and effects, you’d get pretty close to opening track “Snowflakes in December.”
Other songs move in surprising directions, like “Jellybean,” which begins with ethereal vocal washes reminiscent of Julianna Barwick before quickly shifting into something less angelic and closer to early Grouper. Certain songs like “Hudson” and “Charlevoix” recall Cloninger’s work with his Wren Cove duo, incorporating haunting cello from Allegra Whiting of A Girl Named Genny and violin from Chris Stephens of Aaron DeRuyter & The Confluence.
Taken together, “Brutalist” is a collection of well-crafted recordings that never overstays its welcome. The songs are surprisingly brief, fleeting even. The longest (“Type Mod”) comes in barely past six minutes. The brevity works. Cloninger knows when to stop processing, and that restraint keeps listeners engaged from start to finish.
