Robbie Lee: Prismatist

Multi-instrumentalist Robbie Lee has been crafting inventive music since the early 2000s, in a variety of contexts including a rock and roll outfit called Creature Automatic and sideman appearances with folks ranging from Cass McCombs to Mary Halvorson. Lee's duo album with Halvorson, Seed Triangular (New Amsterdam, 2018) is worthy of special note, as it features Lee on a range of medieval and baroque-era instruments that he harnesses in a radical improvisatory context; Lee's unconventional choices open up fascinating possibilities for pan-idiomatic music-making, at the same time pushing Halvorson in new directions as well. Those tendencies were also evident on Opalescence (Telegraph Harp, 2018), a trio album with Norbert Rodenkirchen and James Ilgenfritz that exhibits the same tension between the reassuringly familiar and the unsettlingly strange. Here too, Lee's selection of instrumentation was astonishingly broad, with everything from the contrabass recorder to something called a "glissando Kingma-system quarter-tone flute."

On Prismatist, Lee keeps his instrumental options relatively contained, focusing chiefly on sopranino saxophone, but with tuning forks and live electronics added to create soundscapes that aren't quite like anything else one is likely to hear. With fourteen tracks, most under three minutes in length, the album is a collection of disparate ideas rather than a programmatically unified whole; and the radically divergent instrumentation contributes to this impression. The opening piece, "Duskfallen," gives Lee a chance to present his sopranino unadorned, with joyous leaps and jagged intervals that reveal more than a glimpse of Lee's facility on the instrument. But things soon turn in a more disconcerting direction, with "The Expanded Present" producing looped effects with the aid of the electronically-augmented tuning forks. It's impossible to tell if Lee is using his sopranino here or not—nor does it really matter, as the emphasis is entirely on texture and mood rather than traditional performance or "soloing." With a variety of discrete instrumental timbres scattered around the soundfield, it's a mesmerizing effect.

Lee's creativity is especially evident on tracks like the too-brief "Truetone," which loops the sopranino to create several different tones simultaneously, something he uses to even stronger effect on "The Invention of Blue Sky," where the electronics create an almost dialogue-like dynamic. These pieces, despite their artificially enhanced characteristics, still feel somewhat more organic than the more austere pieces like "Timecode" or "Curvilinear," which decenter the listener by resisting the pull of a more conventional instrumental approach. Much of the album's appeal lies in the back-and-forth between these disquieting improvisations and the less otherworldly interrogations, like "Depends on What You Mean by Go Round," again featuring four minutes of Lee's un-augmented sopranino.

It's not a long album, at just over 35 minutes, but its depth and substance belie its brief runtime. It's also a release that rewards close listening, especially with headphones, as Lee is making music that depends on each subtle gesture being recognized and savored.