Blood Moon Deconstructed

Album review

M. Craft's 2016 album, Blood Moon, offered a set of atmospheric, orchestral songs derived from what started as longer piano improvisations. The original piano pieces had been written upon his arrival in Los Angeles after ten years in England, and the final album emerged from a retreat to a desert cabin in Joshua Tree, where he sculpted the songs. It turns out that, for Craft, the album wasn't so final after all, as he continued to see potential in components of the tracks. On the all-instrumental Blood Moon Deconstructed, he takes the material from its namesake in a variety of directions, sometimes stripping them back and rearranging parts, and sometimes creating original compositions based on a kernel of a song. Much more aggressively reworked than your average remix album, it features new titles for the entire track list and additional performances by guests including harpist Mary Lattimore, bassist Maxwell Sterling, percussionist Danny Frankel, and drummer Seb Rochford. Blood Moon's minimalist instrumental opener, "New Horizons," employed repeated, only gradually shifting piano chords that were eventually joined by a growing swell of sustained strings. In contrast, Deconstructed's first track, "Hip Meds Frolic," consists of a few repeated single notes of piano alternating with solo violin. The violin carries something closer to a melody, if a spontaneous-sounding one, but the track remains muted throughout. Later, the eerie and spare "Adorn Me" makes use of irregular percussion, alphorn-like groans, and noir-ish electric bass before it's eventually fleshed out by lusher sustained strings, as if capturing daybreak. The maintained nature theme is not only implied in the music but explicit in titles like "Violet Dishevel" and "Mud Bloom." The latter repurposes memorable chord progressions from Blood Moon's title track and provides one of the album's more expansive arrangements. However, all is relative where the deconstruction is concerned. Even subtler and more ambient than the quietly cosmic Blood Moon, Blood Moon Deconstructed functions more as a companion piece than a strict remix or sequel. It returns listeners to the vast desert and starlight, this time without any voice and only remnants of the familiar to serve as a guide.
© Marcy Donelson /TiVo