Raymond Larsen
Songs to Fill the Air
Slow and Steady Records
With his fifth album Songs to Fill the Air, local composer and trumpeter Ray Larsen makes a bold step into new territory as a singer-songwriter and producer. Larsen, a graduate of the UW School of Music and faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts, has employed his precise trumpet tone to the whimsical sonic backdrops of projects like the psych-prog group Chemical Clock, and his trio Tyrant Lizard, with guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi and bassist Carmen Rothwell. His latest release, begun during a 2018 residency at Bainbridge Island’s Bloedel Reserve, expands the canvas of his ideas to a climate, a serene and eerie ecosystem, vividly colored with the sounds and personalities of his fellow musicians from the Northwest.
Harkening back to the lush tin-pan alley extrapolations of 60’s era studio savants like Van Dyke Parks, Songs (as the title implies), presents an orchestrated suite of songs, interspersed with atmospheric interludes, heavy as clouds. Larsen marks his own debut as a songwriter with harmonically savvy tunes that tackle the place of a person, and of people, in the greater world, bringing his music from into the present through a quest for the authentic.
Flutist Leanna Keith throws open the curtain with a flourish in the springy “Hello World,” as the brave brass of Larsen’s trumpet steps out, followed by a duet between his decorous whistle, and delicate melodies on the piano. After a scene change to “Dream Sequenza’s” park of winds and chimes, the tune shifts in modality revealing, like a watercolor wash, sparkling ideas from the delicate harp of Sophie Baird-Daniel. Guitarist Luke Bergman, who recorded the album with Larsen as producer, doubles the melody’s dreamy line on the track’s end with a soft fuzz tone.
Larsen doesn’t shirk from using the entire studio as a means for songcraft, setting the mood with spare electronic textures and letting horns twist polyphonies on the Ellingtonian chant “High Low.” The strings of Alina To and David Balatero back up the Nilsonn-esque meditation on ambition and aspiration “Golden Tomorrow,” where Larsen ponders bittersweetly on the professional game of “dreaming to see it all / dreaming to have it all.” Elsewhere, the descending progression of “Song for the Shifting” sounds out in voice and string like a forest clearing, blurring the bird whistle of his field recordings.
Though the trumpeter concludes that “no one knows exactly how they got there,” on his humorous setting to rights of the human species in “World History,” it’s his long-standing relationships with local musicians that really set the stage. Take the spooky “Abraxas,” where reedman Greg Sinibaldi lays down an uncannily abstracted solo on the EWI, or electronic wind instrument, soaring through a progression prodding via drummer Chris Icasiano’s impeccable downtempo.
As new listens reward with finer detail, listeners can remark even more on Songs’ “royal-we symphony,” as Larsen calls it on a slow-rock paean to aesthetic universals, “We’re the Music.” On quiet days, noise approaches music. Truly, there must be something in the air, bubbling up from beneath this song’s wavering texture: a community of musicians turning sounds into something larger than themselves.
–Ian Gwin
