Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band

Album Review

Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band is Ezekiel Honig's second release (after the Microcosm Music 2006 release Scattered Practices) and his first appearance on his own Anticipate label. As expected, the album is in tune with the label sound Honig had already established through other artists. His music is a delicate blend of musique concrète, electronica, and post-rock (especially in the use of electric guitars). The approach can be likened to Fennesz's circa Endless Summer: letting the tune shimmer in and out of focus under a blanket of fragile sonic pollution. For concrete materials, Honig turns to the everyday life: household sounds, street and subway ambiences, barely heard conversations. This gives the music a resolutely urban feel, yet the sketchy melodies seem to yearn for a more pastoral life. "Broken Marching Band" and "A Brief Visual Pattern" have a strong rhythmic element (and both are pretty good), while the other tracks are more free flowing, the two-part "Material Instrument" marking the abstract end of the album's spectrum. On first listen, Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band sounds like many other post-Endless Summer post-rocking electronica CDs. But it grows on you, and as it does, you start to hear and feel Honig's peculiar take on the genre, his subdued use of field recordings, his artistry. ~ François Couture, Rovi