The “Shadow Music” of Tropos

GOLUB-FABRIZIO: Nightlight Shadow. GOLUB: Hurl. The Garden. Hitchcock’s Staircase. FABRIZIO-SMITH: Dark Bulb / Tropos: Phillip Golub, pno; Mario Layne Fabrizio, perc; Laila Smith, voc / Endectomorph Music EMM-014

This strange but fascinating CD captures the sound of an entirely unique trio, Tropos, whose aesthetic is based as much on sound texture as such as it is on musical structure. From a sheerly analytical viewpoint, there’s not much going on in this music—a few isolated notes from piano and/or percussion here and there, occasionally with the voice of Laila Smith tossed in for color, yet they manage to hold your attention because it is a sequence of sounds that fills space without always dominating.

Our intrepid trio: Golub, Smith & Fabrizio

On the contrary, so much of it is quiet and ambient that when pianist Golub finally explodes, for instance around the 4:35 mark in the opening track, it seems more like a release of energy than it does an imposition of loudness. It’s almost as if the paved road on your street was somehow boiling just under the asphalt, then suddenly the asphalt cracks and out comes d dark spirit—which, after spending its energy, dissipates and disappears into the ether. There’s really no other way to describe this music, and to be honest I think you’d have to consider it closer to modern classical music than jazz. Even though much of it is improvised. there are few if any signposts that identify it as jazz in any recognizable sense. Yet it is intellectually engrossing as well as emotionally moving.

Pianist Phillip Golub describes the music best:

Shadow Music chronicles an adventure at night in many ways. We were quite literally recording into the night, but we were also thinking very much about the resonance of that–processing, dreaming, being visited by nightmares, tossing and turning. It’s hard to explain how focused we were recording this music.

If you fight the blanket of music that Tropos presents, or insist on trying to pigeonhole it, you’ll surely be disappointed. Just let it wash over you, and you’ll get it. Some of Leila Smith’s vocal interjections reminded me of Meredith Monk, if Monk were on acid. On The Garden, she sounds more like an alto flute. Again, it’s hard to describe. Yet it works.

I recommend listening to this disc at night, with the lights down low or off. You’ll be seduced into Tropos’ sound world, and it will somehow make sense to you. Recommended.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

Follow me on Twitter or Facebook

Check out the books on my blog…they’re worth reading, trust me!