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The six tracks on vie en rose flow together and speak to the listener and each other like the story of a journey from a starting point to a transformative destination, almost like a romantic era symphony or one of the classic concept albums of the ‘70s. Asked if this was by design, Reichman demurs: “It’s not a concept album in that there's no narrative from track to track,” he says, “but I made it with a consistent set of processes that it's fair to say are conceptual.”

Reichman, who studied with two of the greatest avant-garde musicians of the last 100 years, Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton, explains his approach: “As I've been making electro-acoustic music in last ten years or so, I’ve gradually realized that even though my work is music, my methods and way of thinking are more like a painter or a sculptor.” The tools for vie en rose are rooted in playing instruments, “semi-improvised live performances” that for him come out of the music of Braxton, Terry Riley, and Pauline Oliveros. The sculptural aspect comes from sampling his own playing and processing it into abstracted sounds he can collage and layer. Referring to critic Maggie Nelson, Reichman says “I wanted to cast my critical ear on my own playing. Basically, I wanted to appropriate myself.”

Vie en rose is the story of that process, the drama in hearing what Reichman found in himself, and realizing what he could turn it into, the narrative of chipping away at a block of stone until a shape emerges. This is music, so what he found comes in waves of textures and sonorities that accumulate to build a glowing, resonant space. The opening track, “amaryllis,” rises like the sun, “quiet nights,” with Eric Gorfain laying out a cycling pulse on the piano (and playing violin), rolls past marvelous features, like a bike ride on a bright day. Old cassette tapes of his piano practice, real-time playing that includes using an e-bow on a prepared piano, is layered with expanding reflections on the deep, still space of “en rose.”

Reichman points to that, adding "since my greatest inspiration in the studio is King Tubby-style dub, I also try to make the processing a living thing,” There’s the drama of concept, of process creating transformations, becoming. What’s uncanny about it all is how it has much motion and is also pictorial, a real synthesis of Reichman’s self-listening, which, he says, “became much clearer to me last winter looking at the Philip Guston Now exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Seeing the burying and scraping away and abstraction and reemergence of things in his paintings was a major inspiration to the record” Inspired to make his own art, the pink he saw in Guston emerged in his own drawings, “so did the tracks, and the title,” vie en rose.

Catalog Number: PM21
Release Date​: Feb 16, 2024
Formats: Cassette, Digital
Edition: 50