Parallax Ensemble - 2014 - Parallax Sounds

 

Just Temptation Recordings – JT009  334.57MB FLAC

Parallax Sounds is a soundtrack that works as a compact portrait of Chicago’s experimental music culture without attempting to summarize it. Created for Augusto Contento’s documentary about the relationship between the city, its architecture and the independent musicians who developed there, the album brings Ken Vandermark’s compositions together with songs by David Grubbs. The result sits between jazz, post-rock, chamber music and film score, reflecting a scene whose most important artists rarely accepted the categories assigned to them.

The Parallax Ensemble interprets Vandermark’s writing with a lineup drawn from the overlapping worlds of Chicago improvisation and underground rock. Vibraphone, trumpet, reeds, guitars, bass and percussion produce a sound that can feel carefully arranged one moment and precariously open the next. Vandermark’s compositions rely on strong shapes rather than conventional themes. Repeated figures, clipped horn lines and shifting rhythmic cells give the ensemble direction, while the spaces between those elements allow individual musicians to alter the music from within.

“Nowhere Is the Place” immediately establishes this balance. Bright vibraphone and brass create a clear architectural surface, but the rhythm remains mobile beneath it. The piece advances through interlocking patterns rather than a standard head-and-solo format. “Invisible Roads” is leaner and more elusive, suggesting movement through parts of the city that remain outside the official map. The ensemble sounds disciplined without becoming polished, preserving the friction that gives Vandermark’s writing its physical character.

The two parts of “Tomorrow Is the Past” emphasize repetition and changing perspective. A figure heard from one instrumental angle returns in another form, making the title’s contradiction feel structural rather than merely poetic. “Crystal City” has a harder, more reflective surface, while “Lady Loop” stretches the ensemble into a longer cycle where groove, texture and improvisation gradually become inseparable. Vandermark’s brief solo reed pieces interrupt the larger arrangements like close-up shots, reducing the soundtrack to breath, key noise and exposed melodic fragments.

David Grubbs supplies a contrasting form of intimacy. His songs are spare, dry and slightly detached, with guitar and voice placed close to the listener. They do not attempt to compete with the ensemble’s density. Instead, they function as private rooms inside the larger urban construction. Grubbs’ writing carries the fragmented logic associated with Gastr del Sol, where a simple song form can be interrupted by an unusual chord, a pause or a line that refuses immediate explanation.

The album’s strongest quality is the way it avoids nostalgia. Although the film examines a period when Chicago became internationally identified with post-rock, free jazz and independent recording, the music does not imitate a settled historical style. Steve Albini’s presence within the project reinforces the city’s culture of direct, unembellished sound, but Parallax Sounds remains too varied to become a monument to any single scene.

Like the visual effect named in its title, the record changes according to position. Heard as a soundtrack, it supplies atmosphere and movement for a film about music and architecture. Heard independently, it becomes a sequence of intersecting perspectives on the same city: composed and improvised, public and private, rhythmic and suspended. Parallax Sounds does not define Chicago. It shows how differently the city can appear when viewed through several musical lives at once.