Andrew Pekler - Nocturne 2

Seventh track on Andrew Pekler's Nocturnes, False Dawns & Breakdowns LP. (~scape)

As any music fan knows, the way you remember music can be significantly different from the way it actually sounds. Often, songs that rock in your mind don't rock so hard on record, and all too often things sound slower than you recall upon playback. Andrew Pekler makes music that sounds the way someone only vaguely familiar with the late-'60s/early-'70s work of Miles Davis might remember the ambient cool jazz sound when not intimately familiar with the extensive and complex elements. He achieves this, of course, by sampling jazz records from that era, a technique he first utilized on 2002's Station to Station. But while the extended jams of his first album evolved slowly into their own devices, most of the shorter cuts on Nocturnes, False Dawns & Breakdowns act more like fleeting memories, a more suitable construct for music that plays with recall like this. Only "False Dawn" makes readily apparent the digital realm in which Pekler functions, adding hiss and synth tones to the mix, but from the looping vibe of "Stardusting" to the fully played-through drums of "Streetworm" Pekler's notion of how vintage jazz plays in our heads is often times more accurate than the real thing.

Review by Joshua Glazer