Matthew Halpin - Agreements (2021) [Hi-Res]

When I first put on Matthew’s record, I felt like a kid again—lying on the floor of the living room, dreading the moment when a song would end. Matthew and his band of musicians—Kit Downes on organ, Hanno Busch on guitar, Sean Carpio on drums, and Sergio Martinez on percussion—embody present, past, and future. They expand and contract, maneuver past impossible hairpin turns, and interact with kaleidoscopic intricacy.

The result is a glimpse into Halpin’s vertiginous inner life. On “Dancing with the Devil,” Downes’s organ shrieks above the fray as the band builds into a Boschian orgy. On “To Do,” the same organ paints planar surfaces and hallucinatory shapes, weaving a retrofuturist fugue state in the song's second half. Martinez and Carpio propel “The Beach'' forward with a groove at once relentless and weightless, scintillating like the light that reflects off the water on a perfect summer’s day. In “Treetown,” Halpin and Busch’s electroacoustic bird calls remind me of the Brooklyn mockingbirds that have learned to imitate car alarms: nature adapting to technology. The track recedes like the natural world it represents, increasingly silent in the wake of destruction.

Perhaps most breathtaking is the album’s final track, “Sleep,” which features singers Veronika Morscher, Laura Totenhagen, and Rebekka Salomea Ziegler. They offer a prayer masquerading as a lullaby:

Sleep beloved.

May your sleep be sound and

Silence all the world’s alarms.

Time, unwound.

Time, unwound.

The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,

For the foul winds blow.

Everything outside us is wind and snow.

Around them, the band spins a ghostly fabric of nocturnal sounds: muffled footsteps, a clock ticking, a draft sneaking through a crack in the window, billowing curtains, the Cagean sound-silence of dark space. Yes, everything outside us is wind and snow. Thank you Matthew for giving me somewhere safe to rest my weary soul, a place I never want to leave.

Matthew Halpin - tenor saxophone, composition
Kit Downes - hammond organ
Hanno Busch - electric guitar
Sergio Martinez - percussion
Sean Carpio - drums
Veronika Morscher, Rebekka Salomea Ziegler, Laura Totenhagen - voices on “Sleep"