Jan Esbra shares two inspired tracks and videos from their upcoming album Temporary Objects. Taking cues from artists like Steve Reich and Pauline Oliveros along with contemporary experimental artists Emily A. Sprague and Sweet Trip, Esbra utilizes guitars, samplers and various effects pedals to create vast, textural landscapes that are imbued with a warm, emotional quality. Throughout these pieces he explores ideas of impermanence, playfulness and spontaneity by tapping into his background in improvised music and composition.
“Eternal Recurrence” is the first single from Temporary Objects. The Rube Goldsburg like contraption of orange juice production mirrors the twisting and turning dips and peaks of the heavily processed guitar lines put through a Dittox4 looper pedal. I know what you are thinking, but it’s not a looped passage like we think of. Rather, it’s burst and bloom and then burst again opening of melodic phrasings repeating, diving and then reoccurring in mutated half-versions of themselves. A totally beautiful and knotty composition that perked my ears right up.
Continuing with the effects heavy production of Jan Esbra’s Temporary Objects, “An Open Space” was created with a guitar synth pedal (Meris Enzo) and a pitch shifted looper (CBA Blooper). Together they created some very simple harmony that allowed for a soaring melody to blossom. You can hear that simple scraping the ceiling of a low cloud ceiling. Totally angelic tones that shift up and down in harmonic resonance. Really impressed with the relatively simply tools Esbra is working with to create some effects that many artists with 4k in modular gear can’t replicate.
