The drummer Dave De Rose and the keyboardist Dan Nicholls play extensively in avant-garde jazz projects, yet they are equally drawn to ambient and club music – hardly unusual these days. Four years ago, they joined forces for their first collaborative album, Plants Heal; the name has since become their moniker as a duo as well. With their new record Forest Dwellers, they venture not into the thicket but into open terrain, exploring what might grow from their attempt to create a kind of improvised rave sound.
The word “rave” is indeed apt, especially when the music evokes the early nineties – a time when four-to-the-floor beats and cheerful breaks coexisted freely, and when a naïve curiosity for discovery prevailed. As Plants Heal sift – ahem – through more recent musical history, they uncover their own present: one in which they can calmly bustle along or slip into a trippy, ecstatic bounce.
They make no claim to functioning as human machines. The fact that the music is played by hand is audible in their instruments – not as a lack of precision, but in the character of the drum sound and in the spontaneity with which they make subtle course adjustments to give new ideas room to emerge.
Forest Dwellers
