Joseph Shabason

Anne

BY Tom BeedhamPublished Nov 19, 2018

8
Formed around interviews he conducted with his mother, and based on how she views herself through the lens of her Parkinson's disease, at its core, the second album from Destroyer/DIANA saxophonist and electronic composer Joseph Shabason is an extremely personal rumination on the fragility of life.
 
But there's a persistent thermal capacity to the work, delivering that experience while avoiding any clichéd representations of illness and finding relief in what the present is able to provide.
 
More outwardly expressive and emotionally forthcoming than Shabason's 2017 debut, the compositions on Anne patiently reflect the unsettling grounds for this undertaking and the weighty accumulation of sadness at its root, with decompressive lyrical bursts that were absent on prior album Aytche.
 
Like Aytche, the subject is never mentioned explicitly, instead sublimated in the face of deeper questions like marbled strands of a kaleidoscope image, true nature shifting with time and exposure to light. As Shabason bends, stretches, and warps instrumentation, field recordings and interview clips alike, he's working in neo-expressionist portraiture, mining the ambiguities of the abstractions to beautiful, evocative effect.
(Western Vinyl)

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