Balmorhea - A lakeside nocturne for strings and orchestra

Austin, Texas: one of the most artistically vibrant cities between the 90s and the 2000s, strongly shaped by the fervent activity of bands loosely tied to post-rock, chief among them Explosions In The Sky.

Although the Texan capital's artistic scene has never lived by post-rock alone, it is in a sense from that very milieu that the story of Michael Muller and Rob Lowe begins — two musicians of very different backgrounds who put their inspiration and skill to work on what at first might have looked like an acoustic, chamber-music take on that loosely defined "genre", but which soon revealed itself to be something far richer, resistant to any rigid classification.

When they met by chance while both working at a summer camp in the Texas Hill Country, Michael was dabbling on guitar, while Rob was already at the peak of his largely classical piano training. As often happens when people share similar interests and musical tastes, it took the two almost no time to click, and before long they naturally began playing and writing songs together.

Thus was born the core of what would gradually grow into a small chamber-music band, whose very name proclaims the unbreakable bond its two founding members have with the harshest, most unspoiled corners of their homeland, as well as with the place that framed their fateful meeting: Balmorhea is in fact the name of an artificial reservoir near the eponymous small town in Reeves County, one of the farthest western outposts of Texas toward Mexico — a land of contrasts between desert valleys and wooded slopes, between arid sand expanses and, indeed, the life-giving relief offered by the lake.

The contrasts of the Texan landscape — to which the duo would repeatedly show themselves deeply attached — and the imposing stillness of the lake's waters recur in Muller's understated picking and in Lowe's measured piano writing, which intertwine in an austere, at times even prickly, dialogue, yet one rich in emotion that is never overwhelmed by the carefully spare compositional structures.

These are the essential ingredients blended into the self-released, self-titled album that marked the duo's debut in 2007. A quiet beginning, both in terms of production means and distribution. Yet, thanks to live shows and word of mouth online, Balmorhea began to circulate and win praise, showcasing acoustic textures and a pianistic minimalism superficially comparable to that of Max Richter or Arvo Pärt. However, the musical world sketched out in broad strokes on the Balmorhea debut leans instead toward an acoustic, chamber-music reworking of compositions that alternate fragmentation and cadences tracing back to a strand of post-rock drawing together the desert-like textures of early Tristeza, Jimmy LaValle's Album Leaf, the distant jazzy guidelines of 33.3, and the Louisville-style experiments with time signatures and instrumentation carried out by bands such as Sonora Pine and, above all, Rachel's. It is indeed hard not to draw some link between the unforgettable piano of Rachel Grimes and the one played by Rob Lowe, equally capable of distilling romantic tenderness and rising into nervy crescendos (as in the excellent "If Only You Knew The Rain").

Despite these touchpoints and affinities, the context in which Balmorhea operate from the very start is substantially different, breaking significantly from genre conventions through pared-down instrumentation that is nonetheless more than enough to reveal the cornerstones of a music that blends (post-)classicism with faint folk undertones, carried by crystalline picking that likewise never tips over into sterile virtuosity. The many intersections between piano and guitar — occasionally joined by banjo, distant vocalizations and the odd field recording — thus give rise to a work that already sufficiently outlines the boundaries within which the duo would move in the near future, both musically and conceptually: throughout the record, in fact, notes and tempos evoke images of night, of travel, and of the great uninhabited spaces that Muller and Lowe draw on with a capacity for abstraction that, in tracks such as "Baleen Morning", "En Route" and the lakeside nocturne "And I Can Hear The Soft Morning Rustling (As If Snow Were Skliding Down The Mountains)", already stands imposing and evocative, even if not yet fully realized, due to the limited means available and a certain compositional shyness.

The overall result of the record is nonetheless decidedly commendable, enough to draw the attention of fellow Austinites Western Vinyl, who at the start of the following year, 2008, released Balmorhea's first official album. Besides benefiting from a more polished, professional production, the duo were now joined by a string section, brought in to lend a broader romantic sweep to the sparse compositions found on the debut.

Alongside the trembling emotion of the piano, which grabs hold from the very first notes of the airy "San Solomon", the new record carries not only the latent romanticism of the ever-present violin and cello, but also the sunny clarity of a more assertive picking style, which in places even brushes against Latin-tinged shades.

Within this framework, which testifies to the growing maturity and rapport between the two Texan musicians, unfold the fourteen compositions gathered on Rivers Arms, in which, against a largely consistent underlying idea, multiple expressive registers and notable thematic and compositional variations alternate. Indeed, although Rob Lowe's piano rises to a central role in the band's music, his playing moves effortlessly across a wide range of stylistic options, spanning from the austere grace of "Lament" and "Limmat" to the nervy emotional torsion of the superb "Barefoot Pilgrims".

However singular it may seem given its premises, Rivers Arms is an album built entirely on latent musical and emotional contrasts, on perceptual opposites that attract one another until they find a perfect, remarkably natural balance.

The same interplay of imagery holds true for the moods evoked by the songs, mostly steeped in a serene composure yet constantly shifting, from the luminous contemplation of vast landscapes to the intimate embrace of the remaining minimal piano pieces, in which the mere spaces between the notes are enough to take one's breath away and achieve a result of plain, spare intensity.

It is in a dreamlike dimension, in a timeless season, that Balmorhea's music is situated, somewhere between the sun-drenched acoustic notes of "The Summer" and the sublime surge of "The Winter", between the airy romanticism of so many graceful melodies and the claustrophobic unease of "Context" and "Process", the two tracks in which convoluted field recordings take over, sketching out static still lifes that edge close to dark-ambient territory.

A work far more complex than it may appear on the surface, Rivers Arms reveals the splendor of the many facets of an opaque yet purely limpid crystal, one that cements the band's style through the lucid compositional class of its authors and the crepuscular tenderness of sonic textures brimming with fragile yet lingering emotions.

As further proof of Balmorhea's remarkable creative vitality, a new gap of just one year separates the enchantment of Rivers Arms from its follow-up, All Is Wild, All Is Silent. That brief span, however, proved enough to present the band in a noticeably transformed guise, both structurally and, in part, in terms of inspiration. The latter draws on Texas's distant past, to the point that the whole album comes across as the diary of a 19th-century settler, while in terms of execution it stands as the product of a more expanded lineup: the original duo had by then grown to include drums and a permanent string trio (Aisha Burns, Travis Chapman and Nicole Kleen).

This richer instrumental setup goes hand in hand with an evolution in Balmorhea's stylistic identity, which by this point had settled into a restrained chamber ensemble, intent on exploring the many facets of a sound ranging from hazy timbres to vivid pastoral moods, all filtered through a meticulously crafted harmonic romanticism.

Most of the compositions on All Is Wild, All Is Silent are in fact built through progressive layering of elements, with instrumental passages and melodies that surge forward and recede like a swelling tide.

The core of the record remains anchored to the splendid piano-and-violin flourishes already admired on "Rivers Arms", around which a plurality of compositional solutions gravitate, giving rise to something like a soundtrack for harsh, sun-scorched expanses, but also to acoustic flights tinged with Latin colors, sometimes placid, sometimes spirited, as in the joyful handclapping that crowns the opening "Settler". Although nocturnal interludes and shards of solitary piano are not in short supply, All Is Wild, All Is Silent offers continual rereadings and transformations of the band's basic formula, through a skillful balancing of tempos, tones and melodies.

The emergence of folk undertones on banjo and mandolin strings ("Remembrance", "Night In The Draw") and, in some passages, the vocals of Jesy Fortino round out the picture of a work crafted with great care, the fruit of a genuine inspiration far more complex than a superficial listen might suggest. In this renewed guise, the Texan band offers its own distinctive take on romantic restraint, blending descriptive imagery, traditional cues and expressive intensity with a class comparable only to that of the finest Dirty Three (hard not to think of them, at least, when listening to the last two minutes of "Harm And Boon").

Even more multifaceted, yet also more cerebral than the fragile emotionality of its delightful predecessor, All Is Wild, All Is Silent stands as a thoroughly convincing confirmation for a band able to chart an evolutionary path for a musical formula that only through such transformations can prove it hasn't lost its potential.

The knack for "transformation within continuity" shown on All Is Wild, All Is Silent is confirmed, and indeed heightened, by the unusual treatment the album received just a few months after its release. Nearly the entire record was reworked by a number of artists, mostly operating in electronic and ambient territory. Among the names involved are Eluvium, Xela, Helios and Library Tapes, all of whom reshape the original tracks according to their own artistic stamp, making All Is Wild, All Is Silent Remixes (released in only a few hundred vinyl-only copies) not a mere appendix but a work with its own self-standing identity, in its attempt to "fill in" the spaces left open by the Texan band's chamber-music textures with a broad catalogue of electronic swells, glitch, drone and assorted noise.

As further proof of the band's prolific output, within just twelve months it was already time for a new album, their fourth in four years: at thirty-eight minutes, Constellations is Balmorhea's shortest record, and from its creators' stated intentions it leans toward a far more minimal approach than its predecessor.

Even so, the record turns out to be quite complex, since it features a continual recombination of instrumental and stylistic elements, through which the band sums up, with extraordinary technical and emotional skill, a plurality of registers that highlight both the inspirations of its recent past and its current distinctive style.

Conceptually devoted to the theme of night, Constellations is anything but a dark album, still centered as it is on the band's two main pillars: warm acoustic notes and intense piano pieces. Far from being a more stripped-down variation on what the two previous albums had already expressed, Constellations seems instead to be the fruit of countless small experiments in segmentation and interlocking parts, in which the band poured all of its compositional and emotional tension toward achieving a balance impervious to disruption, even amid the constant intersections of instrumental pairings and shifting shades.

The result is an astonishingly multifaceted minimalism, whose modulation of timbres and cadences runs through the whole record, continually redrawing its contours: in the touching pianistic simplicity of "To The Order Of Night" and "Winter Circle", in the bare interplay of guitars and banjo on "Bowsprit" and "Herons", but also in the jazzy hints of double bass, the recurring melodic unevenness of the piano, the restless strings of the closing "Palestrina", and the persistent organ that lends density and distant post-rock cadences to the surging harmonies of the deeply intense "On The Weight Of Night", one of the most moving pieces in the Texan band's entire catalogue.

The thousand details chiseled with such skill by Balmorhea make Constellations yet another top-tier achievement, confirming the ongoing uniqueness of an artistic journey that exists outside of time — one that, by combining formal perfection with communicative power, stays true to Rob Lowe and Michael Muller's willingness to question themselves album after album, both in terms of instrumental arrangement and their uninterrupted exploration of suspended moments and compositional registers.

On the follow-up Stranger (2012), the Texan band — by then expanded into a sextet with the addition of percussionist Kendall Clark — shows that it has broadened its scope toward a more deliberate compositional style, in which the essential elements that had framed the previous albums are diluted into a more elaborate context, one still tied to the post-rock roots of their early days while also pushing forward from what, on Constellations, might have raised suspicions of flattening into expressive codes that, however still fascinating, had grown thoroughly established.

The ten tracks on Stranger, then, don't upend Balmorhea's expressive style but rather enrich it with a series of elements, some traceable back to their self-titled debut, others radically new. This may owe something to the fact that the record was cut at Chicago's Tortoise-affiliated Soma Electronic studios, but the fact remains that, from the nearly nine minutes of the opening "Days" onward, "Stranger" breathes a somewhat different air compared to the band's recent past: guitar loops, synths and pronounced rhythms immediately mark out the territory in which the Texan ensemble's new compositions unfold — compositions that still conjure landscapes, but wrap the essence of the record in a balanced blend of lingering acoustic delicacy and powerful electric surges.

Electric guitars and pronounced percussion thus gradually take the place once held by placid acoustic arpeggios and romantic piano pieces, bridging the band's past and present in the lounge-like transformations of "Fake Fealty" and "Pyrakantha", and in the unpredictable prog drift into which the seven minutes of "Artifact" spill.
Whether the fruit of passing experiments or a sign of a small shift in the band's path, Stranger can at the very least be considered a decent representative of the "transitional album" category.

After a full five years away, they released Clear Language (2017). Leaning harder into minimalism, the band devotes itself to a cleansing of sound that – as the title itself suggests – emerges forcefully and almost becomes a kind of manifesto against the chaos of the countless noises and shouted voices of contemporary society. Having left all tension behind, Clear Language moves between synthesizer, piano, vibraphone, strings and guitar with an even more stripped-down minimal approach. The opening track "Clear Language" is born exactly this way, from a minimalist synth loop followed by piano. Simplicity and lightness are the main elements – and at the same time the strength – of a sound so personal and distinctive. The pulsing vibraphone and drum rhythms of "Sky Could Undress" evoke Mogwai-style scenarios, though far more pared-down. When the guitar arpeggios come in, the mood doesn't change – if anything, the intimate, crepuscular feel is heightened ("Slow Stone", "55", "First Light"). "Ecco" and "Behind The World" bring the electronic component more to the fore, though it still remains in service of a rigorous exercise in subtraction.

With The Wind (2021) they land on the historic German label Deutsche Grammophon. The Texans crown this arrival point (and perhaps a new starting point) with a work fundamentally different from their previous discography, innovative and classic at the same time. "The Wind" emphasizes the band's minimal side and almost entirely cuts ties with anything resembling post-rock. Electronics vanish in favor of twelve rigorously acoustic tracks that fully embrace the world of modern classical.

Twelve watercolors of chamber classical music, with brief piano melodies and sketches of acoustic guitar alternating with operatic vocals or other acoustic instruments (winds and strings). The Wind opens and closes in a circle with "Day Dawns In Your Right Eyes" and "Night Falls In Your Left", where the melody of the first is set against the nihilism of the second – almost a silence interrupted by a few piano notes and a long sustained background note, which underpin the reading of the medieval tale drawn from Gervase of Tilbury's "Otia Imperialia".

The one moment where a hint of electronics resurfaces is the little gem "Rose In Abstract", a moving union of piano and strings. The piano's dialogue continues with a clarinet on "La Vagabonde", an extremely simple composition that still carries traces of that Mogwai-style post-rock sound that underlies the Texans' history. Guitar pieces alternate throughout, among which "Landlessness" and the playful "Ne Plus Ultra" stand out. The track the single is taken from is "The Myth", where Lisa Morgenstern's operatic vocals and a sparse guitar arpeggio (which can't help but recall the guitar compositions of Labradford) reach a truly exemplary point of balance.

Inspired by a medieval tale in which a saint carries the wind into an airless valley, and dedicated to the environmental activism of Greta Thunberg, "The Wind" is a turning-point album marking a new maturity for the Texan duo Balmorhea. One can only hope it's also a new beginning.

Contribution by Valerio D'Onofrio ("Clear Language", "The Wind").

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google