Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia - 2010 - Onrushing Cloud

 

Blue Chopsticks – BC21  160.55MB FLAC

Onrushing Cloud begins with three musicians feeling for the edges of a room that does not yet belong to any of them. “Hermitage” is spacious but never empty, opening through isolated guitar tones, faint electronic movement and percussion that seems less interested in establishing a beat than measuring distance. David Grubbs and Stefano Pilia do not immediately divide themselves into lead and rhythm guitarists. Their instruments hover, overlap and occasionally touch before separating again. Andrea Belfi listens from inside the gaps, placing drums, cymbals and electronics where they can alter the shape of the silence rather than simply filling it. The piece sounds like the first encounter it partly preserves: three distinct musical languages discovering a temporary common grammar.
The trio formed after Belfi and Pilia traveled from Italy to New York for a Harlem Studio Fellowship residency in the spring of 2009. All three had previously recorded for the Swedish Häpna label and were already familiar with one another’s work. Grubbs brought a history stretching from Squirrel Bait and Bastro through Gastr del Sol and a large catalog of solo and collaborative recordings. Belfi had developed an idiosyncratic approach to percussion in which drums, electronics and acoustic resonance continually exchange roles. Pilia brought a guitar language capable of moving between drones, carefully articulated melody and dense amplified texture. Calling them a power trio is accurate, but Onrushing Cloud removes the usual implication of muscular rock display. Its power comes from concentration.
The album contains five pieces totaling just over half an hour, but they function as one continuous arc. The tracks are not linked through obvious crossfades or repeated themes so much as through the trio’s growing confidence in one another. “Hermitage” preserves caution. Each musician leaves room for the others, and the music’s slow movement creates the impression of a structure being assembled while the listener stands inside it. Guitar notes are allowed to decay completely. Cymbal resonance becomes an event. Electronics gather around acoustic sounds without revealing where one ends and the other begins.
The title “Hermitage” suggests withdrawal, solitude and a shelter deliberately separated from ordinary activity. Yet the piece is made by three people negotiating shared space. That contradiction becomes important throughout the record. Onrushing Cloud is intimate without being comfortable, communal without erasing individual voices. Each player retains a private territory, but the boundaries remain permeable. A guitar tone can enter Belfi’s electronic field and return with its apparent scale altered. A drum strike can redirect two sustained guitar lines without becoming a conventional rhythmic command.
“Nitrated Out” tightens the atmosphere. The title suggests an image exposed, chemically altered or burned away through photographic treatment. The music becomes sharper and more compressed, with guitar gestures appearing in quick, angular relationships. Belfi’s percussion begins to establish a firmer pulse, but the track never settles into an ordinary groove. Rhythm arrives as a sequence of pressures and interruptions. A cymbal opens space; a drum closes it; an electronic vibration continues underneath both.
The brevity of “Nitrated Out” makes it feel like a flash of overexposed film between the larger structures surrounding it. Grubbs and Pilia’s guitars sometimes sound almost identical, two clean electric lines meeting in the same register. At other moments, their differences become obvious. One instrument may produce a dry, sharply defined figure while the other spreads into sustain and feedback. The pleasure comes from hearing those identities continually exchange positions.
“City Rats on a Mountain Pass” provides the album’s closest approach to a stable rhythm. Belfi’s drumming is patient and understated, giving the guitars a moving ground without forcing them into a rigid pattern. Grubbs adds piano accents that arrive with unusual weight because the album has been dominated by strings, metal and electronics. Each chord seems to drop vertically through the piece, briefly organizing the surrounding material before the guitars begin drifting again.
The title introduces figures displaced from their proper environment. City rats belong in alleys, tunnels and dense human infrastructure, not on an exposed mountain road. The image is comic, but it also carries vulnerability. Urban instincts offer little protection against altitude, weather and open distance. The trio’s music creates a similar displacement. The instrumentation suggests a rock band, but the familiar habits of rock music have been removed. Drums do not guarantee momentum, guitars do not promise riffs and piano does not provide harmonic reassurance.
The title track finally introduces Grubbs’s voice. Its arrival after nearly sixteen instrumental minutes feels significant without becoming theatrical. He sings in a calm, measured register, describing travelers stranded on a mountain as an approaching storm reorganizes the world around them. The lyrics are concise, allowing the instruments to supply the scale and danger that the words deliberately understate. Lightning creates a moment of suspension, and events demand complete attention.
That description also explains the trio’s method. Onrushing Cloud is music built from attention under changing conditions. The players do not attempt to dominate the storm or convert it into dramatic spectacle. They notice the exact moment when the atmosphere shifts. Belfi’s percussion gathers force while the guitars thicken around the voice, but the song retains a peculiar stillness at its center. The cloud rushes forward; the people beneath it can only watch, listen and adjust.
Grubbs’s singing gives the album a temporary human scale. Until this point, the music could be heard as abstract relationships between sound, space and time. The voice reveals that the landscape has contained bodies all along. Yet the singer does not become a heroic narrator standing above the instruments. His words are surrounded by guitar resonance and electronic weather, another fragile signal inside a much larger system.
“Lightning Vault” closes the record with its longest and most expansive piece. The title joins sudden electrical discharge to an enclosed chamber, suggesting lightning captured inside architecture. The trio gradually increases density without abandoning detail. Belfi’s drums become more forceful, Pilia and Grubbs build overlapping guitar fields, and the album’s earlier restraint begins releasing stored energy. Still, the piece avoids the predictable post-rock climb toward one overwhelming climax.
Instead, intensity appears in waves. A guitar figure gains volume, encounters another layer and then withdraws. Percussion pushes forward before dropping back into scattered impacts. Electronics occupy the air between instruments, making the whole performance feel larger than three people while never obscuring their individual actions. The vault does not explode. It contains repeated flashes, each briefly illuminating a different part of the structure.
The production preserves a remarkable sense of physical space. Instruments sound close enough to reveal touch, yet the reverberation around them implies a much broader environment. Belfi’s cymbals carry long tails, while guitar notes can appear dry in one moment and distant in the next. This shifting perspective gives the album its cloudlike quality. The music has recognizable edges, but those edges continually dissolve and reform.
Onrushing Cloud belongs to a tradition of experimental rock that treats improvisation and composition as overlapping activities rather than opposing methods. The five tracks possess clear identities and deliberate shapes, but their internal life depends upon reaction. No instrument merely executes a fixed role. Every gesture changes what becomes possible for the other two players.
That responsiveness prevents the album’s restraint from becoming polite. The musicians leave space because space increases consequence. One piano chord can redirect an entire passage. A single snare hit can feel violent after several seconds of suspended guitar. A voice entering late in the record can suddenly transform abstract sound into weather experienced by human bodies.
The album ends without clearing the sky. “Lightning Vault” spends its final minutes holding energy inside shifting layers, then releases the listener without a grand resolution. The storm has passed through the music, but no one announces that safety has returned. What remains is the heightened perception produced by exposure: every sound separated by distance, every movement carrying consequence, and three musicians discovering that a power trio can become most powerful when nobody insists upon standing at its center.