Album Review: Improvisations by Zomes

Chilly and warm, heavy and light, Asa Osborne's third Zomes LP (two-thirds of which was originally released as a limited-edition, bright red cassette in 2010) explores similarly monochromatic, even more intensely minimalistic terrain than his first two. Whereas Zomes and Earth Grid featured Osborne's grainy cassette-recorded Casio ruminations split up into short, discrete "songs," each with its own (if overwhelmingly similar-sounding) musical idea, Improvisations is broken up into three lengthy pieces -- 15, ten, and eight minutes, respectively -- none of which offers any particular harmonic/rhythmic/melodic ideas at all, to speak of. Each is basically an extended drone, billowing in intensity but otherwise static; adorned with layers of swirling, amorphous, fluidly meandering keyboard squigglings that are intermittently more active or more placid, but always equally static in harmonic terms.

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