leedont

[leedont]

I'm kind of confused why developers keep saying how no one has the resources that Larian did to make Baldurs Gate 3. What is so different about Larian that allowed them to make this then say Bethesda? Firaxis? I swear I'm not trying to be obtuse, I just can't see what makes them so different from the outside looking in.

Larian is independent and isn't trying to pop stock prices or quarterly numbers as immediately and directly as those other studios kinda have to do.

They probably built up a good chunk of money and goodwill with their previous games (maybe they took on some investment, I don't know exactly how Larian operates) and spent it making BG3. Then they put it out in Early Access back in 2020, giving them another influx of cash to work with, allowing them to take their time with it over the next few years.

In some ways it's a perfect storm because they built up that goodwill with the Divinity games, so when it came time to say "we're making Baldur's Gate 3," people trusted them with a legendary franchise and bought it before it was finished.

[leedont]

Aaron Dooley — The International Disassociation of (Centripetal Force/Island House)

This second outing of 2023 from Aaron Dooley’s seven-piece jazz ensemble shimmers and shifts, an indefinite haze of sound breaking, sporadically, for clear flights of melody. Dooley, a bass player out of Denver, plunks a subtle, unsettling undertow, allowing other instruments—pedal steel, saxophone, even drums—to slip to the forefront. All improvised, these cuts absorb multiple points of view into free-flowing inquiry, not muddying them, but softening the edges.

“Passing Tres” for instance weaves slow-moving textures of bass, percussion, saxophone and trumpet together, letting the drums float to foreground with their punches and cymbal shivers (that’s Diego Lucero on kit). It’s a luminous, somewhat indistinct sound with flares of fusion-y futurism, a musing, narcotic drift to it. A skirling saxophone, played by Gabriella Zelek, breaks through like a swimmer to the surface, the bass roiling deep underneath. “What About Being Alone” shifts the focus to Cooper Dickerson, his plaintive surges of pedal steel lifting out of the soundscape, while Zelek’s sax swirls and blows around him. “Reward of Consequence” provides space for Aesop Adams, the guitarist and Dooley’s partner in Osmium House, to let things rip.

The disc’s first three cuts are relatively concise. The last three stretch to wider horizons. “Westbound Alameda” does this in a lyrical, laid-back way, an elastic foundation of bass and struck percussion supporting flares of trumpet (Gavin Susalski), slithery runs of sax and, again, that gorgeous pedal steel. “Funeral of Fireflies” abstracts country pedal steel into abstract shapes, letting the thump and pound of percussion push it away from conventional twang. Adams, here, executes whistle-high harmonics that cut through the haze and Zuri Barnes sings warmly, evocatively in the background. It sounds like a slightly countrified version of Laraaji’s transcendental bliss. Dooley’s band is rooted in jazz, but not confined by it. The final track with its stand-up bass and swaggering horn line sounds the most like big band swing. It also allows the wildest bouts of brass improvisation, with Susalski arcing off into the stratosphere from a swaying, grounding foundation.  

It's not easy to get even a couple of people on one page, let alone seven. These tracks show a still relatively new configuration of people finding their way together, making a shared path and diverging from it.

Jennifer Kelly

[leedont]

Ruth Anderson / Annea Lockwood—Tête-à-Tête (Ergot)

There’s power in intimacy, and Tête-à-Tête is a powerfully affecting album. It’s a call and response across nearly half a century, from one lover to another, trading the same essential material. Annea Lockwood first met Ruth Anderson in 1973 about a job. Anderson was a composer and the professor in charge of Hunter College’s electronic music studio, which Lockwood took over for nine months so that Anderson could go on a sabbatical. They instantly fell for each other, and connected throughout Anderson’s time off by daily telephone calls, which she recorded and then edited into a tape piece, “Conversations,” which she gave to Lockwood as a gift.

“Conversations” opens with a snatch of a rickety piano negotiating some corny old song. It ends, and one of the women clears her throat, starting a dialogue of coos, questions, greetings, partings, monosyllabic interjections and hearty, life-affirming laughter. The participants’ shared affection is naked and giddy, the way new love can be, and their exchanges are simultaneously very private and quite universal; if you’ve ever felt this way, you’ll hear a bit of yourself in their them. But it’s also a work of carefully considered composition; Anderson had to sift through months of recordings and sequence them just so in order to make this stuff register as something other than a souvenir, even though that’s exactly what it was for 46 years. Preserved on cassette, it stayed between them until after Anderson’s death in 2019, when Lockwood listened to “Conversations” and decided to make a response.

“For Ruth” contains some of the same raw material. Lockwood has kept some of the voices, ditched the piano, added sustained notes by an operatic singer and woven them into field recordings taken from a bird sanctuary and various bodies of water that were dear to both of them. The fragments of speech are now rare fragments amid the honking of waterfowl and the trickle of streams. The piece is calm, like a memory of a good thing that’s gone but still gives comfort. Old love salutes young love.

The album also includes “Resolutions,” a purely electronic composition from 1984. It’s made of slowly descending pitches, which slowly wobble and settle into nothingness like a raw and hasty Eliane Radigue piece. It sounds profoundly dissimilar from the rest of the record, but makes sense on a conceptual level, since it reflects another ending, since it was the last piece of electronic music that Anderson ever finished.

Bill Meyer

[leedont]

having a seizure

[leedont]

The democrats

[leedont]

Tom nailing it