Balmorhea The Wind 45rpm 2LP

Texas-based duo Balmorhea are back with new music! After an intensive five-year touring phase, the two founders of Balmorhea, Rob Lowe and Michael A. Muller, took a break from touring to improvise and experiment together again. Her new album The Wind, inspired by meditations on the natural world and its fragility, an ancient story about a saint who carried the wind into a vacuum in France, and thoughts of climate activist Greta Thunberg, who crossed the Atlantic on the catamaran La Vagabonde, draws a journey through an evocative soundscape, touched by echoes of prayer flags fluttering in a Himalayan breeze, an old harmonium, a pipe organ, a trio of double basses, wind chimes and beguiling guitar and piano instruments.

The Wind marks both a return to Balmorhea's original constellation as a duo and a new beginning as their first album to be released by Deutsche Grammophon.

Like a lot of Balmorhea's music, it sounds handcrafted, with the physical creaks of the instruments audible, matching the tone of the album's theme regarding the fragility of nature. Pieces like 'Landlessness' and 'The Myth' focus on rich, autumnal acoustic guitars, accompanied by flowing strings and wordless vocals. The more piano-based selections, like 'Evening' and 'V,' tend to be colder and more reserved. 'Ne Plus Ultra' is the brightest and most springlike moment on the album, with its guitars conjuring up images of tall, swaying waves of grains. 'The Crush' stands tall with a majestic piano melody as well as chilling, distant vocals and a hazy foam of additional instruments. Balmorhea's major-label debut is appropriately one of their most accessible efforts, but it's also one of their most intimate, and just as expressive and evocative as the rest of their body of work.