Montreal composer Markus Floats’ dynamic new LP moves between free jazz, musique concrète, and minimalism. Whereas his previous records were largely individual endeavours produced solo with MIDI instrumentation, Fourth Album welcomes contributions from Ari Swan (violin), James Nicholas Dumile Goddard (saxophone, mbira), and Lucas Huang (drums, guitar) of the improvisational group Egyptian Cotton Arkestra. Their playing adds immense texture to Floats’ weathered abstractions and generates new lines of inquiry for the project’s timbral and rhythmic exploration. On the all-caps dyad “AS ABOVE” and “SO BELOW,” the trio adds a free jazz engine to Floats’ tonal structures; on “Wands,” the record’s penultimate track, a cymbal extends an emotive denouement with tonal richness. On the closing track, “C,” Floats manipulates the voice of the American poet and scholar Frank Moten against a plaintive drone. As the track ends and a sonic fog lifts, Moten’s theorization of study as the collective work of “figuring it out” emerges with startling clarity: “What we’ve been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out,” he says. Moten’s are apt words to conclude this playful and often moving study in the collaborative process. Fourth Album is another push forward for the composer—a record of surprising and sometimes exquisite joinery.
