The debut full length from long-time sonic adventurers James Holden and Waclaw Zimpel is a set of focused improvisations striking out for the cosmic zone, for inner space, the weightlessness of trance. Holden & Zimpel are explorers, chasing the ego death, when the music starts to make itself, melting time. This transcendental impulse reaches beyond language, making it tricky to write about. Consider how the word trance feels worn down and sticky. The Universe Will Take Care Of You is a helpful signpost of a title, its music calls for colours and nature metaphors, animal spirits and the movement of the heavens.
The first track is called ‘You Are Gods’. Off we go. It shimmers and glimmers, bass bubbles up to become rhythm. Nothing is settled in this universe. All is rippling and vibrating. All is dancing on the higher frequency. Now we are here, suspended, we are nowhere. All is swiftness, unhindered, limitless. Zimpel’s clarinet is atomised. His disembodied voice becomes a sighing choir. There’s a brief visit from a delightfully clunky drum preset at the end, almost like a grounding moment.
Following their earlier Long Weekend EP (where the tracks were named for the days), the credits give a full date for each piece, suggesting they are immediate productions if not capturing fully ‘live’ performances as such. Certainly the instrument list suggests some layering and mixing but even here they bend away from dull annotation towards evocation with credits for ‘arpeggio clouds’ and ‘blue noise’. On ‘Sunbeam Path’ Holden’s contributions include ‘walnuts’ and ‘teacups’ while Zimpel plays glowing lap steel. It is as lovely as its title suggests, a tow path amble beside a shining stream, building a lazy rhythm as it goes.
Mostly recorded in 2022, ‘Time Ring Rattles’ was added last year. Shorter and more frantic than the rest it bursts in the middle of the album, a spray of staccato dots and vivid daubs achieving a swarming mania. Calming down again ‘Sparkles, Crystals, Miracles’ is a warm and dreamy beauty, its mood gently ascending into a widescreen outro. On ‘Incredible Bliss’ Zimpel plays the algoza, a folk woodwind of twin pipes, over electro pulses and jangling percussion. Offset by the organic timbre of the pipes, his melody line feels a like a soaring techno tweaker. And if the title is a bold claim, it swirls and ascends to the mountain top, a cosmic goat rave banger.
The Universe Will Take Care Of You gazes out into the void until a chord pattern begins to resound, strengthening as it repeats, returning us to the hum of the universal choir. In a cold, empty, universe, is the title sentimental hippie tosh, or is the very miracle of our consciousness and existence on this habitable planet amid that starry vastness evidence of its truth?
