Gabriel Zucker — Leftover Beats From The Edge Of Time
Leftover Beats From The Edge Of Time sits in an awkward, though often oddly compelling place between mixed meter jazz, manic chamber music, angular mood scaping, and theatrical touched art-rock/ singer-songwriter fare. It’s the second album from New York City pianist, composer, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Zucker- and I think it’s fair to say it’s one of the most disorientating and unbalancing albums I’ve heard in some time- where harmony and non-harmony meet, merge and fight it out.
The release appeared in September of last year, as a double CD/ digital download on ESP Disk’- I’m reviewing the CD version of the album. The CDs come presented in a four-panel digipak, which features wood and paint-based art, as well splodgy abstract paint art on the CD faces- it’s a simple, though effective enough bit of packaging.
The material on the set were recorded between the years 2016 & 2019. With Zucker handling piano, composition, vocals, electronics, and production. Over the two discs, he’s joined by a total of sixteen musicians- who add in trumpet, Tenor Sax, Clarinet, viola, cello, male & female vocals, bass, drums and guitar.
Over the two discs, we find twelve tracks- these have run times between three and thirteen minutes. The first disc opens in a fine wonky and unbalancing manner with “Requiem #1 (Leftover Beats)” which finds felt cascading melodic piano, rubbing against a mix of slurred and different keyed horn work- with a lead slightly showy female vocal line coming in the last few mintues. As we move through the first disc we come to rapidly darting and bound key work meets waving swooning string work of “How To Keep, Forever” which along its eleven minutes features an often dense & darting structure that takes in horn vamping jazziness, ornate and warbling feltness, marching horn and key rolls, and electro melted string layers. Towards the end of the first disc, things open up/ layer back/ slow down slightly with “Stage Whisper” which finds pitch-shifting string work playful weaving and chasing its own tail, with latter on lazy piping horn work coming into play, to create a feeling of felt-yet-confused smokiness.
Moving onto the second disc, we have the skittering ‘n’ snaking beats, tolling showy piano, and smoulderingly wavering female vocals of “Song Bird”. There’s the rapid key cascading meets full horn swooning opening of “Such Closer”- which later adds in the same weary female vocals over a dense and shifting framework of darting keys, wailing and sailing horn, hazed string hovers, electro drone haze, and warbling female backing vocals. With the album/ disc playing out with the layered piano key dart and cascading of “How To Know, Forever” which swims between being playful & charmingly harmonic, and angularly bounding- with at points both extremes occurring at the same time.
Leftover Beats From The Edge Of Time is daring, often heavily layered and at times chaotic record-which both challenges and entertains. I can’t say it’ll be a record that will work for everyone, due to its blending of the often harmonic and non-harmonic- but I found it a real revelation, that's primed perfectly for when you want something multi-layered and unpredictable.