John Beltran has done it again: he has created an ambient album that feels grand, colourful, melodic and emotionally overwhelming, without fundamentally reinventing himself. With Sunrise and the Way We Live, he has also found the perfect title for his larger-than-life panoramic paintings – the best since Ten Days of Blue (1996).
For the Detroit-based artist, producing music is akin to painting on a blank canvas. Delicate impressionist splashes, such as the increasingly intense piano spirals in ‘The Echo Bridge’, contrast with majestic landscape watercolours like ‘Soft Rain’, which combines a stuttering drum machine beat with delicate synth sunbeams. The title track, in particular, evokes Beltran’s classic (mentioned above), released 30 years ago now. This musical ‘hidden object’ painting thrives on constant movement, on those synth colours that once defined a career.
Once again, Beltran sets to music the glee of unbridled anticipation, a deeply childlike feeling that becomes increasingly elusive as one grows older. Which, in turn, opens the floodgates to emotions such as melancholy. It’s a good thing that the present plays, at most, a secondary role in this music, as is the case with Eluvium, for example. If someone manages to pull off the same trick time and again in such overwhelming fashion, and virtually without losing any of its substance, then that person doesn’t need to reinvent themselves. That is great art, which is always allowed to remain just as it is.
