Mark Guiliana: Music for Doing

With an album title like Music for Doing, drummer Mark Guiliana makes his aim clear. Few artists are as adept at fusing electronic music's warmth with intricate and propulsive rhythms propelled by intricacies of jazz improvisations as Guiliana. And he is really doing it. His music boundaries are infinitely elastic. Guiliana is a multifaceted artist who traverses many different music areas with his own bands or those led by others. This variety is evident on his own albums such as Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music! (Motema, 2019) or Jersey (Motema, 2017), and also on records as part of Donny McCaslin Quartet's Fast Future, (Greenleaf, 2015) Beyond Now (Motema, 2016) or on David Bowie's Blackstar (ISO, 2016).These albums, to name but a few, reveal Guiliana's worldview—the best way to achieve growth is through unhindered exploration and experimentation.

Music for Doing, is both a superbly structured album and a beautifully styled one. This is very much an electronic music album, though it covers an enormous amount of ground within that broad terrain. With its beautiful, minimalistic beeps and bleeps, Giuliana sounds impressively contemporary as he focuses on nuanced songcraft and creative arrangements. What he has is an improviser's ear for details of timbre, and a maybe pop drummer's knack for catchy patterns. As a result, the music flows like a suite, where everything is constantly in motion. What is most striking about it is how, despite sounding very much like other blip-hop sounding records, this is weirdly organic, imaginative music, where one never quite knows what's going to come next. What makes it different from others who create fusion/electronic music records is that Guiliana puts the technology of the music in the background. The music comes first while the sound excursions are second. This is why this music is ear candy. Music for Doing is fascinating, carefully crafted, riveting music.

At his best, Guiliana treats music as a playground. The album's opener, "Song for Making Things Right," is bleepy, full of futuristic undertones, beats, and expansive keyboards driven song by Guiliana 's arresting collages out of loops, samples, and electronic percussion. "Music for Investing Consciousness" juxtaposes delicate rhythms with tricky patterns and various electronic sounds ornamented by layers of analog synthesizers. This is bolstered by saxophonist David Binney, whose speech-like saxophone conveys expressive solidarity with every beat.

The lines between tracks and the instruments are continually blurred. The songs grow, move, change, rise, fall, build, and resolve, and never stay in one place for long. They are full of surprises and are filled with plenty of illogical moments that tend to accrue logic with every new listen. There is a barrage of sonic details that gives each track something special. But not everything is delicate, fast-paced, and architected. "Song for Looking in the Mirror" is a beautiful ambient track that is reminiscent of the German school of ambient (Tangerine Dream or Neu) which gives a different type of sensuality. This combination of arresting beat-driven songs and ambiances makes for an attractively varied experience. Music for Doing portrays an artist with an unusually focused and playful vision of what music is capable of.

Comments