(2020) Quicksails - Blue Rise


Review:
Chicago musician Ben Baker Billington is best known as the drummer for avant-garde collective Ono and free jazz trio Tiger Hatchery, among others. Under his electronic moniker Quicksails, Billington charts a calmer course through an archipelago of lambent synth based ambience. Built from layers of drones, loops and melodic snippets over intricate electronic and acoustic percussion, Billington creates eight miniature atmospheres from pieces recorded between 2016 and 2019. Though made before COVID, these are ideal vehicles for transcending the difficult times in which we find ourselves. By turns meditative and transportive, Blue Rise drifts by like a soft breeze with enough pollen to keep the listener both relaxed and alert. Filigrees of vocal samples, shakers, gongs, clicks, brushes and twinkling synths decorate Billington’s worlds. “Cypress” begins with the kind of glitchy beats heard on numerous Mille Plateaux releases in the early 2000s over a vocal sample that may be an answering machine message or overheard phone soliloquy; chimes and squelchy synth lines fidget and jostle like impatient nightclubbers checking their gear before receiving the bouncers’ benediction. “Believe The Clouds” evokes a similar feeling of itchy anticipation before it resolves into long humid chords and a choir of wordless notes. Billington demonstrates his skill at subverting classic New Age tropes with judicious use of his rhythmic sense and ear for details. The pieces are restless rather than busy like so many of us in this age of confinement and they speak directly to distracted busyness and the lassitude of having things to do, avoidance activity and that combination of guilt and devil-may-care that overtakes us sometimes. Voices heard through walls, staring out the window, distant echoes of life out there and the louche joy of drifting through what ever day or hour it is as music embeds itself into your subconscious and sticks. Blue Rise is a collection of self-contained, three-dimensional jewels that reflect and refract. Pinpoints of light that illuminate without blinding, a tonic of delicacy and harmony in a crude world.


Tracklist:
01 - Cypress
02 - Believe the Clouds
03 - Melrose Move
04 - Sid's Symphony #2
05 - Blue Rise
06 - Ice Walk (With Love)
07 - Florian's Brush
08 - Woodhaven


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits