For significant portions of Making Colors the trio of Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe and Patrick Shiroishi seem more interested in texture and a kind of vaporous or cumulative harmony than anything more sinuously melodic. That is especially true over the early tracks of the album, with the first side – from ‘open (4-a)’ to ‘sweat street 7-QS:ZBN9_’ – unfolding as effectively one continuous piece.
There’s lots of muted and smearing saxophone from Shiroishi while Jaffe uses sensory percussion and gongs along with a conventional drum kit to create limpid and watery splotches or more ramshackle effects, like ink bleeding into the page or somebody pottering about in the kitchen with his gong keeping a kind of ritual time, more than simply setting the scene. Dave Harrington meanwhile can play moody, noodling lines on the guitar and swells or woozy ascents on the organ or pluck and rev at his strings in a way that makes them difficult to discern between some of the electronic treatments and bolder percussive effects.
At the turn of ‘open (4-a)’ and ‘six acting orange (aaaaa)’ for instance his revving guitar engine and the pounding of a bass drum plus more deft work on the sticks all merge into staticky electronics, to provide the impression of a ragged and blackened nimbostratus cloud quavering there in the sky and beginning to relinquish its first water droplets. The piece embraces a more arcade video game energy before sinking towards the dripping deluge and mottled kitchenware of ‘steal from walgreens’.
All of this really comes to a head in the long ten-minute ‘sweat street 7-QS:ZBN9_’ which sits at the centre of Making Colors and closes out the first side of the album. Here a loose patchwork of processed gongs and drum rolls and crashing effects slides beneath Harrington’s emergent pools of guitar, which at times might call to mind the limpidity of Loren Connors. These strums and their silvery overtones set the mood or tone for the piece and briefly honk in a kind of old-school rockabilly gesture as Jaffe slips into a groove, the two sides of the improvisation like reflective pools, sharing sympathies but separated by a small clearing or remaining just at arm’s length.
After around four minutes a buzzing tone both drifts in and seems to beckon the other musicians, which turns out to be Shiroishi’s smooth alto, fuzzy and muffled but oh so melodically smooth. The trio now start to drift in the same direction, with a few organ keys for embellishment, belying the album’s title somewhat as the impression that comes to mind is decidedly noirish, an overview of traffic with its headlights and red tails idling down a neon-licked and night-clad street. Despite the tandem drift, there is a vague sense of wires being crossed before the song’s end, where the sound of a foghorn blast or blaring horn or the skidding out of a vehicle creates a kind of climax or halt ahead of the jerky next piece.
On the second side of Making Colors the standout ‘FRACTAL HASH’ features a steady drum beat, kind of tribal or in the vein of doom metal. A woozy fairground organ loops and grinds from underneath and after a few introductory phrases or smears Harrington and Shiroishi split the scene through some screeching guitar distortions, red hot and revving plus a splaying saxophone line that seems to coil back on itself, with the character if not quite the timbre of a slide whistle or like one of those inflatable tube men with their rippling windstruck appendages.
If anything Making Colors is moodier and more harmonically dense than the trio’s debut album, the Nabokovian gesture of Speak, Moment which stretched from whimsical butterfly chasing and a sort of languid kineticism (‘Staring into the Imagination (Of Your Face)’) towards shifting arabesques and wild water rapids (‘Dance of the White Shadow and Golden Kite’), free funk freakouts (the brief ‘Ship Rock’) and the bluesy march of the album closer ‘Return in 100 Years, The Colors Will Be at Their Peak’. Making Colors also builds on their live album Zebulon! from later in 2024 with the lead single ‘FRACTAL HASH’ cited in the album notes as an example of the heavier sound which they unlocked during live performance.
One might expect after the drama of ‘FRACTAL HASH’ some kind of blowout or giddy and freewheeling end to the record but Making Colors is stronger for relinquishing that little bit and folding back towards a softer ambiance. It feels truer in a way to life with its balance of bustle and quiet or harsher and softer palettes and textures. A pastoral tinge scents and colours the air through brushed and rustling cymbals and a throaty or gravelly or even phlegmy but barely-there horn, with Shiroishi gargling like the sound of water winding its way past rocks in a stream. The drums become ever so slightly more pronounced and we feel the pull of a groove, surreptitious but present and compelling.
Then a third of the way through ‘trackerKeeper’ it is Harrington’s turn to conjure some delicate phrases from his guitar, in a manner that becomes ever more piquant, little strums and pulls that ring out in short peals and eventually knit together before being subsumed by electronics. This electronic smudge, at once gauzy and diaphanous, glimmers with little flashes of plasma. Then the alto saxophone crests the top of the piece and adds more of that rustic pastoralism, not quite Arcadian but shepherding as the trio shuffle out on their shared quest for fresh pastures.
