Steve Gunn & David Moore
Reflections Vol.1: Let the Moon be a Planet
RVNG Intl.
31 March 2023
For this project, the chameleon-like singer songwriter and guitarist Steve Gunn teamed up with minimalist pianist and fellow New Yorker David Moore to create a new musical dialogue, remotely at first, exploring each player’s improvisations. Significantly, the sessions happened at a time when Gunn was experimenting with the classical guitar, a warmer-sounding instrument than his usual steel string and one that informs the overriding character of this ruminative set of instrumentals.
The mood throughout is meditative but experimental, with each player given the freedom to express their musical personality. Interestingly, Gunn says that initially, the objective was not to make an album but just to create, a factor that perhaps adds to the free and confident sound of the finished product. Songs like Painterly see Moore laying down widely spaced chords that invite Gunn to play more tangled notes on the guitar, giving the piece a contrary feel of both calm and disquiet. Morning Mare has Gunn’s guitar sounding more content, playing loose refrains over brighter but still sparse piano chords. Like many of the songs here, there is a lo-fi yet cinematic quality to the music, and such is the space left in the sound that a succession of hazy images and landscapes float through the mind.
A particularly interesting piece is Paper Moon, where the intimate and warm sound of songs like the preceding Libration, in which the piano sound is close and quite lush, is distanced slightly from the listener, giving the piece a more delicate and fragile feel. It is done so subtly, and the shift is so slight that it demands close listening, but that seems to be the point of the album as a whole.
As a move away from the pair’s usual ‘detail-oriented’ approach to making music, Let the Moon be a Planet feels improvised and free in nature. Still, its natural idiosyncrasies and fine nuances invite and reward deep listening—a quietly rich, contemplative and satisfying experience.
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