Descent by Chas Smith

Chas Smith is one of the most unique musicians working today. He has created his own musical world—complete with its own instruments and “language.” It is a world of expansive musical tapestries and carefully sculpted textures that never sit absolutely still, but evolve via a slow, constant change of aural perspective. Smith’s soundworld, however, it is not an altogether alien one, and critics, in their praise of Smith’s work, have repeatedly compared his compositions—some resonantly beautiful, some darkly brooding, some sonically overpowering—to those of Ligeti.

With Descent, Smith continues to create the great, sometimes clangorous soundscapes that have fed the popularity of his earlier Cold Blue releases. The central pitch and structural ideas for the three pieces that comprise this CD were originally conceived for an evening of music that Smith presented at Los Angeles’s historic Schindler House. Here, those initial ideas are expanded and developed.

On this recording, Smith utilizes his large sculptural instruments, which are all made of various metals (and go by such unusual names as Copper Box, Que Lastas, Pez Eater and Jr. Blue), steel guitar, the recorded sounds of jet engines, and Smith’s self-designed-and-built three-neck steel guitar, “guitarzilla,” which he prepares (a la John Cage’s prepared piano) with metal rods and plays with hammered dulcimer hammers.

“Smith is surely also one of the most original composers working anywhere today.” (International Record Review)

REVIEWS:

“Chas Smith composes and performs epic soundscapes…music that reflects the wide-open spaces of the American West…. Closer attention reveals his subtle layering of instrumental textures. The overall effect is of a shimmering, reverberating soundscape, extraordinarily evocative of the boundless spaces that clearly inspired it: an endless desert under a throbbing sun.” —The Wire magazine

“Southern California-based composer Chas Smith’s sound constructions occupy a paradoxical place between drifting lightness and dense gravity. They move slowly, accruing and shedding sonic elements as they develop within—and ultimately define—their own aural shapes.… Perhaps it is, in part, Smith’s practical grasp of metallurgy, fabrication, and structural engineering that help lend his music its unique sense of physical mass within space. Indeed, he designs and builds himself many of the musical instruments used in his compositions, and I suspect that those ringing metals and vibrating strings have a lot to do with the density and depth preserved at the root of this, ultimately, electronically-processed music. The two long pieces that make up most of Smith’s new release, Descent, are his most powerful and focused work yet.” —Kevin Macneil Brown, Dusted Magazine

“Smith’s Descent deploys an idiosyncratic sound design to generate tonal sculptures of massive textural density.… Calling Smith’s instrumentation unusual is an absurd understatement. Aside from the familiar cry of his steel guitar, Descent‘s three long pieces feature sounds produced by metal-based sculptural instruments (which he even names: Copper Box, Que Lastas, Pez Eater, and Jr. Blue) and a custom-built, three-neck steel guitar he calls Guitarzilla. Smith’s compositions are grandiose vistas teeming with twilight sonorities, admittedly destabilizing slabs of modulating sonic material whose woozy unfurl recalls Ligeti. The eighteen-minute title piece establishes the album’s disorienting character immediately with sustained tones that subtly shift until—true to the work’s title—they eventually spiral down in transitions so glacial they verge on imperceptible. A persistent, low-pitched thrum crawls along the bottom of the droning piece, a sound vaguely similar to the bass hum of Tuvan throat-singing. Endless Mardi Gras opens with the faint babble of conversation and the noise of jet engines until crystalline tones slowly supplant the rumbling, while the ambient tapestry of shimmering washes in False Clarity ascends to a remarkably ethereal crescendo that’s so subtly woven into the fabric of the piece it almost escapes notice. As Smith is less concerned with fashioning conventional melodic compositions than depicting sound as a living entity, his work challenges listeners who like their music easily broached. Still, though Descent‘s heaving masses may be alien in character, they’re engrossing nonetheless.” —Ron Schepper, Signal to Noise magazine and Textura

“During a sunny Californian winter day past January, galactic hobo Chas Smith plays Descent from start to finish in the environment it was created in, and the earth begins to rotate backwards. His crowded hi-tech state of the art studio in Encino, Los Angeles, knocks you out with its welding and metalwork machinery, vintage guitar amps, handmade, colorful cowboy boots, walls adorned with “Girl on The Billboard” voluptuous female figures—and Paul McCarthy drawings. Madly sweet. His sometimes kinetic, Harry Bertoia-related sound sculptures are a by-product of his job as a welder, and they’re specifically conceived for and fully integrated into his own compositions. His pedal steel guitars, sumptuous instruments of elegiac desolation, from a vintage Bigsby to his titanium custom-made Guitarzilla dominate the view in their metallic splendor.… ‘A solitary genius,’ as Susan Alcorn describes him, Chas follows no particular school of composition but his own, modeling sophisticated structures of layered complex harmonics to reach organ-like intensity.… Descent is constructed around the Doppler effect on the pedal steel’s modified pitches and the flawless shift of its sonorities into pure sound manipulation. Its desert grandeur is perversely seductive. The 18-minute title track recedes inexorably, contrary-motion superpositions gradually merging their harmonic long tones with a Gothic downpour of a bowed stainless steel sheet metal. Endless Mardi Gras is 20 minutes of liquid sky travel, notch filters, flutes, zither, Guitarzilla and Copper Box and steel guitar in a hallucinatory rich fountain of overtones, while the closing False Clarity is all pink mountains and lost moments of worship, decaying with the subtlety and color of a shakuhachi. Deep as an abyss, Descent‘s slow resonant orchestration evolves relentlessly, entrancing, angelic choirs riveted in aural alchemy.” —Marcelo Aguirre, Paris Transatlantic

“The line-up of instruments above gives only the vaguest notion of what this recording sounds like. There are three tracks here, averaging about sixteen minutes each. Suffice it to say they probably sound like nothing you’ve ever heard before, certainly like nothing I’ve heard before, not even the other CDs under Smith’s name. Descent is music/sound suggestive of continental drift (it’s that slow). And it’s that…is ‘grand’ the word? It suggests eons. The aura it gives off is like heat shimmering. Its sense of space makes me think of large desert expanses. Endless Mardi Gras is hardly festive. The title’s meant ironically, however. It points out the anti-celebratory, anti-development (at least development in the conventional sense) nature of this extremely slow and very dour soundwork. Anything like this risks serious ennui and it overruns its welcome somewhat at just over twenty minutes. But I’d listen to it again for its generous strangeness. The last cut, False Clarity, fortunately returns to the evocative drift of Descent. It recalls the marvelous bowed piano music of Stephen Scott, but the character here is both tougher and more overtly graceful. It allows itself to revel in the luxuriousness of gradual development.” —Richard Grooms, The Improvisor

“Quite a powerful release.” —Vital Weekly (The Netherlands)

“Crystalline in its execution and highly lyrical in nature, Descent is another winner from Chas Smith.” —Tom Sekowski, Gaz-Eta (Poland)

Chas Smith is a composer-performer-instrument builder who has created a unique musical world—complete with its own instruments. It’s a world of expansive ever-evolving musical tapestries and sculpted textures that display his fascination with both the scientific and the sensual. “With Smith’s music, the sounds are as compelling as his concepts and instruments.” (The Wire)