Hu Vibrational: Timeless

An Adam Rudolph recording is less a collection of musical pieces than of sound paintings. The elements he works with are musical ones—any instrument known to mankind might be used, and often even used to play notes—but traditions of form and melody tend to be tossed out the window from the start. The tones are treated as daubs of paint on a palette, splashed here and there whenever they will add something to whichever imaginary landscape he is evoking at the time.

The scale of his different recordings ranges just as far and wide, from the massive around-the-globe epic Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas (Meta Records, 2019) to the minimalist Imaginary Archipelago (Meta, 2020), to name just a couple of this outing's closer predecessors. His return to the Hu Vibrational outfit sits somewhere in between; this is a sizable yet far-from-crowded combo and, while the sonic paintings still lean towards abstract, there is an immediacy which puts the listener right there—the there in this case being some kind of jungle. Rudolph and a handful of fellow percussionists put a bed of tribal rhythms front and center, or rather tapping and skittering on all sides, while the other players build a soundscape half down-to-earth and half alien.

Timeless is as likely to make use of ambient electronics as organic thumps. The instrumentation leans towards organic with the likes of flute and sitar alongside all the drums, though not without a share of keyboards and live sampling. A simple keyboard haze might suggest morning mist; light wood taps can stand for rustles or footsteps; other synthetic tones get turned into the nuanced cries and squeals of half-imaginary creatures in the wilderness. Almost always there remains a trance to allure and maybe hypnotize; the experience is quietly exotic and (as per Rudolph's norm) not much like anything else out there.