Solitude. It is a word that can plant itself in a sentence like a streetlamp in a sandstorm- steady, singular, and capable of guiding others by its presence. Both the word and the party it is applied to force a reckoning with their settings and the places they appear. These are connotations that can certainly be granted to the encounter with jazz composer and vibraphonist Patricia Brennan present on her debut LP Maquishti.
This is a challengingly quiet album. One that arrives on the threshold of the ears like a breeze running through thick masses of foliage that have given themselves over to photoperiodism. Patricia's genuinely cerebral mallet work on Maquishti is cautious and deliberate, producing melodies that seem to emerge from a hyperaware state of flow. A higher state of individual inflection is achieved through concerted action and hesitant resonance.
It is only Patricia's performances, and her performances alone, which you will rendezvous with on this album. It is not an album born of compromise or co-authorship, and every tone has a singular source. Yet, in spite of this, the sounds she siphons from the range of possibilities present before her with each stroke appear to surround you, envelope you, and disappear from your perception only to reemerge through an entry point in your periphery that you had previously assumed to be a blindspot. Forcing a conversation with her and yourself through dimensions of sensation that were formerly obscured.
Patricia's rippling, chiming departures reinvigorate dulled senses and heighten the awareness of one's own eruption into the terrain and the demanding locus and power of their individual gravitational pull. In sum, Maquishti ushers forth a hush that is difficult to ignore, and even harder to fathom.
