ADAM MILLER - Gateaway

After the end of Chromatics, Adam Miller – a founding member of the band – recorded in his Los Angeles home studio and released his first solo work under his own name, an album of instrumental music that sits completely outside any space and any time. Outside nostalgia, outside the future. Like Vini Reilly, aka Durutti Column, he uses his guitar to sketch eighteen vignettes of emotional geometry, "cooled down" by a clean sound, with that touch of chorus that, to the ear, brings us back to the Eighties, into ambient and coldwave atmospheres. Knowing just how central sound was to the songwriting of the Portland band, we can't help but see how this timbral and spatial dimension also becomes a conceptual and existential condition, one that fits perfectly with the definition of "meditation" that Miller gives these tracks.

Every note played on "Gateway" resonates with an absolute value, and could not be replaced by any other. You can hear it in the cadences ("Lost Guitar"), in the picking ("Gateway"), in the melodies that unfold ("Consulate"), in the choice of more or less subtle chord variations ("Lucky Star", "Voyeur"), in the attackless drones ("Night Bloom", "Blue Energy") and in the measured use of delay and reverb ("The Shared Dream").

The record accompanies us and winds back on itself, holding onto an emotional intensity that is at times disarming ("The Name Of The Lost"), which in some way brings Miller close to early Explosions In The Sky. The most incredible thing about "Gateaway" is that it sounds like the soundtrack to a Hal Hartley film, as though it were a set of instrumentals made by the director and guitarist himself under the pseudonym Ned Rifle. "Gateaway" thus retains the richness, the essentiality and the mystery of the Lindenhurst-born director's films. So the Oregon coast and the New York coast ideally meet in a suspended, potentially infinite circle, where Hartley's archetypal characters settle in the same way as Miller's harmonies and melodies.

"Gateway" is a record that truly no one would have expected today. It surprises precisely because of this "anachronism", but at the same time it comforts us, setting imagination and emotion free.

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23/02/2022