Notes for lacuna and parlor by more eaze state that the album is ‘anchored in the left-field chamber music and incidental recordings that have long accented her roving sound’. That sums it up perfectly, for a record which serves as a nice after-summer discursion, not quite ready to embrace the draft or the colour palette of the autumn, mostly wordless but still companionly, more than content just as the title suggests to lounge in life’s necessary and redolent gaps.
After a chugging opening waltz, the near twenty-minute ‘blanking intervals’ is a swathe of Americana which features the fullest ensemble on lacuna and parlor, with Jade Guterman on the acoustic guitar plucking away at a string in a manner which is strident yet marks the steady passing of time, as the electric axe of Wendy Eisenberg paints shapes in the background accompanied by Alice Gerlach on cello and Nick Zanca on the organ. Meanwhile through languid vocals more eaze conveys the faltering hesitations and cinematic dissolves of a heedless summer, as Gerlach’s cello begins to elevate the piece into a blissed-out reminiscence replete with staticky surges, a recursive pattern of celestial tremors and wafting organ smears.
‘leap year compersion’ is a wind-down at the temporal midpoint of the record, while ‘materials for memory’ and ‘chords, room, solo’ embrace the chamber aspect of lacuna and parlor, with droning strings and field recordings punctuated by the odd plunging key for a kind of weary yet enduring presence. ‘a(nother) cadence’ is brighter and sharper with its quick bowing techniques, and the closer returns to the woozy pedal steel which briefly characterises the opening of the album, with an illuminated, pastel ambiance like sprawling on the sofa with the television set on as a diffuse sunlight slowly fades from the afternoon.
