MARCOS VILLALTA - QUICK EXOPLANET STOPOVER



MARCOS VILLALTA – QUICK EXOPLANET STOPOVER

Melbourne-based multi-instrumentalist Marcos Villalta’s fifth album Quick Exoplanet Stopover delivers on the sleeve art/SF title's promise of stylistic hybridity. It’s a 33-minute hyperreal mystery tour that’s ideal for people who loathe fusion’s extended soloing, but like melodic/harmonic complexity and proto-ambient ECM soundscapes. The South American-Australian jazz composer blends Latin rhythms boldly with flavours of Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock’s astro-jazz/Fourth World neo-exotica, the humour of Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs/Spain, Carlos Bonilla Chávez’s lyricism, Hermeto Pascoal’s jubilant dissidence (Brasil/Universo), and the programmatic expressionism of Miles Davis/Gil Evans' 1960s productions.

Villalta's recording career so far demonstrates continuous if erratic progression and a thematic proclivity for the surreal. The Pregdalia project - two volumes of GarageBand-captured solo synthesizer and guitar pieces – collects tumultuous moods reflective of the artist’s struggles with tinnitus. Sir Kep's Mummy Tummy displays his considerable skills as a guitarist/keyboardist/drummer, but not singer. The 2016 release La historia de todo en treinta minutos (The story of everything in thirty minutes) is a sometimes-bewildering mix of Al Di Meola-like fleet-fingered runs, Joe Pass-style chordal lines, estranging Autotuned vocals, 8-bit keyboard themes, and MIDI synthesizers emerging from disorientating positions in the mix. Imaginative flair and ambition evident throughout his back catalogue is allowed to cohere more successfully in QES.

Opener ‘Unfamiliar Atmosphere’ feels elegiac and moves in some radically contrasting directions: John Mills-Cockell/Vangelis remixed and Basinski looped, exploding into elegantly echo-panned colour. There's distorted and ring-modulated MIDI keys that could be sourced from late 70s Cluster or I Sing the Body Electric-era Weather Report. As with La historia, the music conjures an ECM label ambience of hermetic exploration, its augmented artificiality redolent of Synclavier-era Zappa; but the playful Esquivel-remixed-by-Godley-&-Crème surfaces of these miniatures hide deeper emotional atmospheres. 

In ‘Entering the Noisy Valley’, an integrity of musical line that recalls the flowing motifs in Corea’s The Continents’ Concerto for Jazz Quintet and Chamber Orchestra is passed on to Paul Cornelius’ Liebman-esque soprano sax. ‘Merry Encounter with the Bird-like Locals’ is 21C exotica meets bebop, and closes like Santana morphing into John McLaughlin (or that weird amalgam of the two Os Mutantes’ Sérgio Dias channels on ‘Cantor de Mambo’). On ‘Overnight Partying with Our Beaked Friends’, a sense of growing familiarity in production processing/choice of instrumentation is balanced by a cartoon zaniness suggestive of a Carl Stalling/John Zorn influence.

‘Crying Ceremony’ could be a Chiptune version of the mystical Aztec sunsets Pascoal and Teo Macero created for Miles Davis on Live/Evil. Villalta enters uncanny valley realms with Talkbox lead vocals and software-tweaked chorus; Return to Forever-adjacent Fender Rhodes sounds. There’s a melancholy and yearning in the chorus that recalls the Grecian halcyon whirl prog-classical composer David Bedford created with guitarist Mike Oldfield on ‘The Sirens’ from Bedford’s 1975 Homerian concept album The Odyssey.

The track sequencing could be tighter in some spots, but overall, QES is an enjoyable musical trip that doesn’t outlast its welcome. 

(C) Copyright 2020 Jon Kromka.

https://marcosvillalta.bandcamp.com/album/quick-exoplanet-stopover

 


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