Employing synths, drum machine, and a heavily processed clarinet, Group Listening come into their own as agents of playfully askew dance music, launching into a pulsing beat that is quickly augmented by ascending beams of synth and modulated reed tones. A slinky, ribbiting bass line sneaks in, loosely trailed by a cascading synth arpeggio, and a breathy off beat of clarinet emerges as a counter rhythm. The synths begin a dizzyingly layered upward spiral and are then pared back leading, ultimately, to the bass drop.
Category: Group Listening
Group Listening :: Walks
On WALKS, the third album from Group Listening, the duo of Paul Jones and Stephen Black move into a more electronic frame, the newly synthetic soundscapes captured by a lens that remains fragile, bighearted, and childlike in its wonderment.
Group Listening :: Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol. 2
Group Listening—the UK duo of clarinetist Stephen Black and pianist Paul Jones—returns with Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol. 2. The follow-up to their 2018 debut is a wintry gift, finding the enterprising instrumentalists again interpreting tunes with a tastefully minimalist approach— adding light touches of field recordings, tape manipulation, and drum machines onto their winds and keys covers of works by Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Robbie Basho, Laraaji, Syrinx, and more.
Group Listening
Group Listening return with Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 2, set for release at the top of next year. This new collection finds the U.K. duo setting their sights on works from Robbie Basho, Syrinx, popular folk, and, in this first taste, the inimitable Beverly Glenn-Copeland, covering “Sunset Village” from his 1986 masterpiece Keyboard Fantasies.