It takes a lot to calm my rattled brain. It takes a lot for me to sit still or to contemplate things while being still. Maybe that is why I stopped practicing Transcendental Meditation that had been a big part of my life for over a decade. You see, I seem to be restless most of the time and my mind darts off in tangents. I run down rabbit holes and they turn into a maze of small and large tunnels that I sometimes get lost inside. My daughter has said that I probably have A.D.D. (maybe so). I share all this to say that the track "All Things Ephemeral" calms the kinetic beast inside me.
Maam is the artist. The track comprised of a singular piano and synths pulses with hints of reverb that gently pushes buttons, and even though it is tender, it is dramatic too. From the very onset, you feel maudlin emotions of pain, unrequited love, and of loss in a body of melancholia that, at times, ascends with dashes of hope and acceptance. Maam moves in improvisational ways which I love. Improvisation, whether used to create art on the fly, or whether used to sculpt the framework of what becomes the final piece of art, is (to me) the closest thing to creative purity, to spiritual intervention. Where that intervention comes from is anyone's guess but it is a complexly personal thing from the divine to the sublime, from some entity or veiled emotional ghosts deep within the crevices of the soul.
Maam's work has come across my electronic desk before and while I didn't care for his previous work (for whatever reason), now I wonder if maybe I simply was not in the right head space to absorb it. In any event, "All Things Ephemeral" embraces me, gives me chills, punches me in the gut.
"All Things Ephemeral" is from Maam's neo-classical debut "Gilead".
-Robb Donker Curtius
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Inspired by slowness, contemplation, melancholy, delicate beauty, the ineffable; Los Angeles based composer and pianist maam blends improvisation, minimalist motifs, and subtle synthesis to create mesmerizing piano-driven recordings. Drawing on his roots in gospel and jazz, where spirituality and technique meet, this quiet yet resonant sound is thrown into soul-stirring relief. Heavily influenced by the works of artists such as Nils Frahm and Johann Johannsson, maam explores the diversity of melancholy on his intimate neo-classical debut, Gilead.
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