Hallock Hill

Peter Broderick, “More of a Composition,” 4 Track Songs (Type, September 1, 2009)

You walk down the street and hear a cacophonous symphony beneath the level quartet of your thoughts. You look east and west and see varying lights, and to the north there may be a cloud. The south holds a promise, but the weather is inconclusive. Within site are a multitude of restaurants: Italian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, American, Continental. Some of it has no words, some of it is riddled with words, of a range of import. Classical melodies seep out of some of the doors, cars pass playing hip-hop, some old folkie strums on the corner, a jazz trio has set up outside the subway station, you are thinking of Elliott Smith, and Arvo Part, and Guided by Voices, and Doc Boggs, and everything that played on your college radio station, whether you went to college from ‘80 to ‘84 or ‘90 to ‘94, and you remember the first time you kissed your girlfriend, and now she is your wife, and you’re listening to this Peter Broderick record, and everything seemingly is playing alongside it, just as it always has.

You see, the pianos, guitars, banjos, violins, percussion, are all of a piece— a melange of meaning and timbre and thought and time, to the moment of you, the listener. I cannot remember an album that contained the world in such a way as this— all we hear, whether consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily. Broderick is truly modern, in this way: uncompartmentalized. And yet older: as if pre-cognition. The recent exhibition of drawings from the 8th through 12th centuries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, entitled “Pen and Parchment,” illuminated in stark relief the era prior to the Renaissance’s codification of form and symbolism. This was an era of immense freedom of movement and form, immense graphic imagination. Not the “Dark Ages” we were taught. Broderick may fit well with these thinkers, though perhaps without the stricture of a formal religion behind him. His 4 Track Songs shows a perpetual flight towards expression, within a multitude of forms and structures. Using a cheap microphone to record himself, Broderick transcribed these early compositions (they predate 2008’s Float). As one might record continually over the course of many disparate evenings, Broderick shows the composer’s craft: acts of improvisation leading towards form, towards finality, and therefore to a nascent beauty that has not a boundary. You could say: “File Under R: Rock.” But whoever found it there would be perplexed. If filed under “E: Encompassing” you might hit it spot on. This is truly one of the most inspired and inspiring collections of fragments and feelings you’re likely to hear, assuming you care, and think, and want to be a part of a mystery that can’t be classified by any single genre, or tone, or name.

Peter Broderick’s MySpace page

Type Records

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