Album Review: Greg Davis, 'Full Spectrum 3/7'
Nov 06, 2024
(Autumn Records, cassette, digital) Imagine you're an astronaut voyaging into outer space, and your helmet-encased brain is bobbing around like a dashboard ornament because you've passed out at liftoff. Unconscious and swept up in the ride, you drift in a deep sleep among cosmic dust, floating millions of miles away from planet Earth, its bright elliptical edge burning out and fading to black behind you. Then, after the spacecraft reaches cruising altitude, an astronaut friend punches you in the spacesuit-padded shoulder. When you open your eyes, there is only the awesome sight of stellar beauty amid light-years of unassailable hostile space. What do you hear? It might sound something like Full Spectrum 3/7, the latest offering of airy, blissed-out tones from internationally renowned Burlington composer and experimental musician Greg Davis. Stacked with ethereal, featherlight drones, the album, released digitally and on cassette via his label Autumn Records — also the name of his Winooski record store — is the continuation of a series that Davis began in 2008. Cinematic, celestial tones soar and smolder in ethereal cascades of modulated frequencies. Spontaneous sweeps of dazzling sound explode and fade like falling stars. Forged from the milieu of the new-age movement, Full Spectrum 3/7 has everything to do with ambience. Side A features a single track, "Full Spectrum (part 3)," a striking 20-minute composition that evokes the vastness of space. Fifteen minutes in, a waterfall of harpsichords enters the arrangement, and the effect is that of a velvet veil opening to reveal a new vantage of an astonishing sight. The composition is full of sonic surprises — such as the faint traces of staccato choral voices bookending the track in short bursts — but its many-layered drones crowd the higher end of the register, resulting in a trebly, ringing effect that lacks depth. As the shimmering, synthy drones hold an allure and ominousness, it's hard not to think of David Lynch's mystical aesthetic, as if the mounting tones are beckoning you to peer behind the curtain of your consciousness. The tape's B-side, "Full Spectrum (part 7)," more definitely embraces the series' name, evincing a richer spectrum of tones that fill out the musical register more harmoniously. Here, crescendos are epiphanic, gliding across the track without pattern or meter but moving on sheer intuition. Higher tones shimmer like wind chimes over a lush bed of laser beams; syncopated riffs play out in…