Review of the Album "Air Drop" by Darryl Blood

This dropped into my inbox on day, and I decided to give it a listen. The title “Air Drop” conjures images of supplies descending by parachute, or propaganda leaflets scattered from a helicopter during wartime. This music has slight references to both (some pieces could be the gratefulness for food and equipment dropped into a remote location; others could be the flapping of papers in the wind, against a background of danger). Or it could be that the music has “dropped” through the air onto your computer or device (as it did with mine). The image of birds sitting on a wire suggests another, ickier image — but this is not reflected in the music.

There’s a lot of Pink Floyd, a lot of Brian Eno, and a lot of John Cage in this beautifully-produced suite of ambient keyboard pieces. That is not to say that it’s entirely derivative of other artists and composers (it’s not), but that inspiration comes from many sources which are amalgamated into a new whole. All in all, it’s quite beautiful. The first three tracks lay down the trajectory (or drop?) of the album. “Abernathy” begins with what could be the start of Philip Glass minimalism, but is then overlaid with a melody in what sounds like the Japanese pentatonic scale (in a different key so it’s actually not pentatonic) and the result is somehow reminiscent of the keyboard work in the “Dark Side of the Moon” album. The first “Air Drop” tune (#2; they’re out of order) is a prepared piano interlude that at first sounds microtonal; ambient drones sneak in underneath. The third, “Ardentia”, is straight from Eno’s “Ambient” series, though the melody slowly threads itself through what could be chord changes for a jazz standard. Again, very pretty, if in a slightly bittersweet mood. After these first three, the styles mix and merge. Scattered drumming splatters itself Jackson Pollock style across the prepared piano of the second “Air Drop” (#4), then settles into a steady, slow rock beat underlying the synthesizers in “Novella”. The third “Air Drop” (#5) features a very interesting compositional technique, sometimes heard in the Javanese gamelan: the steady pulse is relegated to the higher notes, while the lower pitches mark off time as deep gong-strokes. The relationship of “beat” to “chords” is inverted. (Miles Davis used the same technique in a slow bebop number, “Nefertiti”, though with a very different end result – it was laid back and infinitely “cool”, whereas Mr. Blood’s piece seems to be a series of nervous glances at a relentlessly ticking clock.) “Voyeur” is another ambient synth piece; then in the last “Air Drop” (#1) the synth and the prepared piano have become one: we’re not sure which we’re listening to at any given moment. Finally, “Stille” (which could mean either “Silent” in German or “Quietly” in Danish) resolves everything with a set of majestic chords that seem to sound from a great distance. The last “Air Drop” piece (#3) is not on the album. I’ll resist the pun about the piece being dropped and assume instead that it did not fit into the overall shape of the album. If the present pieces are any indication of what it’s like, I’d like to hear it by itself sometime. In general what we hear plays on the aspect of “air”: much of the music floats, is blown by wind, or becomes wind itself. In the end, it disappears from the air altogether, slowly departing into infinite space. We listeners are left earthbound, of course, but we are glad to have heard it.