Having transformed from a Vancouver punk into a promising Warp signee with stunning quickness, Babe Rainbow’s Cameron Reed has proven himself a talented creative force as well as a statistical anomaly. After a number of EPs and a full-length from earlier this year, plus time spent touring with Battles, oOoOo, and How To Dress Well, it has become clear that Reed’s most distinctive feature as an artist is his unwillingness to settle into one specific style. Music For 1 Piano, 2 Pianos, & More Pianos, inspired by his time spent touring with How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell, sees him expanding his musical feats to the austere world of American minimalism, borrowing cues from veterans like Erik Satie, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Brian Eno to develop a hybrid of familiar minimal forms: considered, concise piano songs that shudder, percolate, and resonate. Donning a mock-serious title and an alter-ego-y baldness, Music For 1 Piano, 2 Pianos, & More Pianos is Babe Rainbow in a rare mood of pure melodic construction, serving up compositions that are both conceptually strong and emotionally lucid.
The pieces themselves are exercises, but are deftly executed and play like a cohesive record, rich with complexity. Some, like “Car Ambient #3” and “Nova Scotian (Sketch),” skirt the edges of modern minimalism, consumed with the busywork of executing precise movements in service of a gestalt shape, a silhouette, a loaded projection of a sensation onto the listener. “Car Ambient #3,” in particular, is a contrapuntal trek of completion, gradually filling its own gaps in with higher and higher chords, gliding the song across a landscape of foregone conclusions through a network of glassy, melodic phrasings. “Minnesota Winter” and “A Drunk Man’s Lament” spring from more direct references, the former fleshing out a “Six Pianos”-esque minor key motif into a wintry walk and the latter a downbeat, shivering husk of “Gymnopedie No. 1” echoed through a cave’s worth of space. But both also crib from ambient music and film soundtracks, inserting wry streaks of impurity into otherwise verisimilar routines.
Despite the aping of styles and clear influences here (from a fairly familiar canon), Babe Rainbow avoids pure homage. Being untrained as a pianist means that a flurry of other influences sneak into Reed’s experiments, chief among them electronica’s inky tonal smears and the impatient editing of a one-time punk. The record appears more digital and modern on songs like the white noise-battering “Car Ambient #1 (Original),” which sounds like someone stuck a recorder out the window of a moving vehicle and layered the results over a somber suite, or like in “Something To Replace,” where the arpeggios are softened by an analogue warmth that recalls the dulcet timbres of early Plaid or Clark. “YHIM” is the only real indulgence here, a naïve, flighty melody that flips between an uplifting new age waltz and something resembling a Bruce Hornsby song.
Babe Rainbow isn’t a minimalist or a composer, and up until recently, he wasn’t even much of a piano player. These songs are the first time he’s ever written for piano, describing himself in an interview for FACT as “not a piano player, not trained… just a musician with a bunch of ideas.” Yet the compositions are cogent and occasionally stunning in their breadth, fully embodying the moods they seek to convey. I was brought to a somber reverie by “A Drunk Man’s Lament” without actively paying attention to it, only noticing once an otherwise uneventful conversation about dinner grew strangely wistful and bittersweet. Lack of musical training aside, Cameron’s got a smart ear for structuring melodies and an eagerness to learn and try new things, which are far rarer and more rewarding traits to possess.
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