Bill Seaman & Stephen Vitiello — The Clear Distance

Bill Seaman and Stephen Vitiello are both veteran musicians in the deep listening soundscape field, and this release The Clear Distance on Room40 is their second collaboration, following on from 2022's The Other Forgotten Letters.  Here they can be heard creating ambience with instruments, taking melancholic chords and melodic fragments from the piano, guitar, strings and clarinet and allowing them to drift and dissipate, in a sense playing a kind of sensitive, deconstructed take on post-rock or indie soundtrack ambient.

The meandering nature of the note choices leads me to the conclusion that this is a largely improvisational work.  At times the lack of planning and structure is overbearingly vague, and I don't get much out of the first couple tracks. However, there are other moments where a heavy, cathartic emotion emerges, such as the 4 AM revelation of the third piece, "A Moving Touch", with its poignantly introspective use of stacked dream pop and lounge jazz chords.  The emergence of the clarinet in this track is a very affecting moment.

As the album goes on, I'm left feeling it is sleepy and overlong.  In the absence of much structural or tonal cohesion, we're left with simply the sound the piano itself.   The production is nice, yes, and the piano's timbre is luminous and resonant, but the playing can mostly be described as little more than 'noodling'.  People who count themselves rabid fans of ambient pianists like Ryuichi Sakamoto (or extreme minimalism like William Basinski or Morton Feldman) may enjoy this recording more than I do, but personally, I like to feel like we have advanced beyond the basic template of Eno's Music for Airports in the last 50 years, and I'm not sure this album has done so.

Perhaps the musician's biggest mistake was focusing 90% of the recording purely on piano; they have other instruments at their disposal, yet utilize them only very sparingly.  The sluggish, dripping droplet-like proliferations of notes are often something close to a piano-created drone, an interesting usage for what is technically a percussion instrument.  The clarinet's harmony with the piano provides the album's greatest moment, yet it doesn't appear until the 3rd piece, and only appears during a couple moments of 10+ minute jams like "And The Rest" and "A Solemn Nature".  

We're left with a vaguely pretty but scattered and spacey feeling recording that is good as a sleep aid, but much less enjoyable as an active listen.  Trying to pay active attention to this recording mostly leads to my feeling frustrated at the lack of momentum and real intentionality to the note choices.  Moments with specific feeling generally give way to a sort of sluggish blankness again before long, and I can't distinguish much of a shift in tone between different tracks with the exception of the third piece, "A Moving Touch". For more info