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For Nico Georis, music is a lot like nature: you may actively confront it, or just let yourself channel it. Music Belongs To The Universe, his latest offering, to be released April 4th on Leaving Records, is a searching collection of improvisatory, open-ended piano and keyboard experimentation. Threading the line between pastoral melody and desert minimalism, it rings out and warbles, crafting sounds as spacious as the landscapes from which it was conjured. Recorded between 2021 and 2023, Music Belongs To The Universe is the latest foray in a search for music as crystalline as the desert skies that Georis began in 2020, when he first moved out to a remote town outside of Death Valley. Here, he restored what became his studio, Granny’s Dancehall, communing with the elements on 2023’s Cloud Suites and 2022’s Desert Mirror which, along with Music Belongs To The Universe, present as a triptych of desert meditations.
Music Belongs To The Universe, in fact, is first and foremost an exercise in sensitivity, in uncluttered perception. We hear this in the devoted, expectant warbling of “Geological Observations:” Georis’s airy arrangements tiptoe, sit back and finally hover, clearing the way for a kind of music that is more channelled than it is conceived. As keyboards soar, unburdened, above the looped-up soundscape of lead single “Who Knows The Path,” its title rings at once as a question and an invocation.
No matter how trance-like, however, nothing about this is accidental. Relying on experimental delay techniques Georis first perfected on his 2022 reinterpretation of Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, as well as on tape loops developed together with tp Dutchkiss at Wiggle World studio in Los Angeles, melody isn’t just suffused into Music Belongs To The Universe’s ambient sounds; rather, these emanate out of long-hewn chord progressions as if in radiance. Like a gymnopédie for the desert, the recordings on Music Belongs To The Universe flutter and unfold, sunbleached; their arrangements, at once rapt and unobtrusive, attending to the massive world around. As they cast off drama to make room for attunement, they remind us that, sometimes, the most attentive kind of searching feels like letting go.
Music Belongs To The Universe, in fact, is first and foremost an exercise in sensitivity, in uncluttered perception. We hear this in the devoted, expectant warbling of “Geological Observations:” Georis’s airy arrangements tiptoe, sit back and finally hover, clearing the way for a kind of music that is more channelled than it is conceived. As keyboards soar, unburdened, above the looped-up soundscape of lead single “Who Knows The Path,” its title rings at once as a question and an invocation.
No matter how trance-like, however, nothing about this is accidental. Relying on experimental delay techniques Georis first perfected on his 2022 reinterpretation of Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, as well as on tape loops developed together with tp Dutchkiss at Wiggle World studio in Los Angeles, melody isn’t just suffused into Music Belongs To The Universe’s ambient sounds; rather, these emanate out of long-hewn chord progressions as if in radiance. Like a gymnopédie for the desert, the recordings on Music Belongs To The Universe flutter and unfold, sunbleached; their arrangements, at once rapt and unobtrusive, attending to the massive world around. As they cast off drama to make room for attunement, they remind us that, sometimes, the most attentive kind of searching feels like letting go.
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