Niagara pours out music that is suitably amorphous in shape. Although not forceful, their synth-based improvisations are still able to sweep together concepts that are dense and generally lacking in buoyancy. They are practiced at keeping aloft the leaden cognitive bilge of semi-scholastic dispensations in a web of atonal telekinesis that yokes together the three tempests at the bottom of a deceptively tranquil teapot. The Lisbon-based group's latest LP, Parva Naturalia, is named for a collection of essays by Aristotle on the phenomena of the body and soul. The title translates to English as Little Physical Treatises, which I imagine is tongue-in-cheek as the album consists of primarily unreleased material and selections plucked from out-of-print 12"s and nearly, but not quite, lost CD-Rs. All of the songs are spontaneously composed to a greater or less degree and leave the impression of a set of players united in tailing a placid muse. Each track has an odd trajectory of evolution that slowly acquires consciousness of itself as it comes to form the pupa of its more excellent, yet to be realized, self. Parva Naturalia is not simply a conglomeration of attempts to be "Cecil Taylor but with synths" though. It's not as wild and hedonic for starters, but more importantly, it prefers to carefully guide the labor that each track experiences in a way that is not evident in many other improvisational art forms. There appears to be an emphasis on restraint on many of these tracks. An emphasis that produces an air of calmness that permeates the album. The collection represents an assemblage of tracks that patiently cultivates an aggregate understated sense of possibility through damp, rain-scented metallic purrs and the quivering temper of disembodied rave ruts- sounds that often represent power and energy, but here are more indicative of a plateau of inner peace. Despite having been pulled together from different points in Niagara's career, Parva Naturalia demonstrates that the band is remarkably consistent in their ability to make the incidental rational.
