If the core of this collaborative album lies in hushed saxophone, spacious piano, and a 4,000-mile distance between the two main players, then the result feels like a much more intimate and personal affair, music made across a vast distance distilled down to its very essence, a feeling, a mood.
Ambient is the word, but this is anything but a whispy, unadventurous affair that often passes for such music; rather, it’s music tethered to evolving sonic motifs, just with a lot of space between them. A lot. But this positive use of negative space is the key to the album, for it is here, between the gentle ebb and flow of perfectly placed piano notes and drifting saxophone melodies that new and beguiling atmospheres are allowed to pool and percolate.
“Blank Slate” feels like the soul of a late-night jazz bar drifting off into an afterlife, as much a memory of music as music itself. “Rosewood’s” delicate piano is occasionally obscured by a white-noise wave, creating an industrial-ambient interlude (if you can imagine such a thing) before the two instruments combine in a gentle swirl of sentimental, serene, and seductive sonics.
The heart of the album is found with “In-Cloud,” where the sonic palette is expanded to include deft acoustic guitar and intoxicating clarinet, the track no less graceful and gossamer but just somehow deeper, broader, more cinematic.
In a world where music seems increasingly bigger, brasher, and more bombastic, too obvious and overly ornate, Blank Slate, Open Space seems little more than the natural sound of the world beyond the noise, encompassed and contained in the merest of sonic strokes. If most music today resembles a garish and obvious oil painting, what Alaskan Tapes & Blu Miles have created here feels more akin to the most delicate of watercolors, one with the most concise of pencil lines to guide it, and where the white of the background is as important as the sonic hues added to it.
