Lemon Quartet - ArtsFest (Last Resort) - THE SLOW MUSIC MOVEMENT

The Slow Music Movement Blog

Reading about music is a bit like looking at pictures of food - not nearly half as much fun as getting involved, so we scribble a brief intro to hopefully whet your appetite but strongly advise you just hit play and make up your own mind.
There's a lot of music to check these days & hopefully you'll find these recommendations a handy filter.
Trust your ears, not opinions.

18/9/2023 0 Comments

Lemon Quartet - ArtsFest (Last Resort)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

What We Say

Great to see Lemon Quartet back on Last Resort after an appropriately leisurely three year break since the ambient jazz joys of their Crestless LP. I'm also happy to report things haven't sped up, the notes still drift through the speakers with little sonic competition as they explore those distant, episodic memories we place so much stock in, despite the fact that with each passing year they become an increasingly uncertain hippocampus Chinese whisper.

What The Release Notes Say

Memory is malleable. The day you met the person you love, what color shirt was she wearing? At precisely what angle did the sunlight strike his face? How exactly did they glow? These little details are precious, but the strange thing is, the more you cherish them, the more they change. Each recollection is another potential touch point where stories can shift—each replay degrades the truth. Reality’s rough edges smooth, with time. Objectivity is a myth: cameras and recording devices all contort image and sound. There’s no way to know exactly how things were. And yet we still tell the stories, to try to capture how things felt, even though the truth is always slipping through our fingers.

Lemon Quartet’s second album Arts Fests eems to unconsciously circle this thematic territory. Full of loose, yet lush repetition, it seems to function like memory—each dizzy melody recalling and rewriting what came before, subtly shaping each piece as time passes. Not that they seem especially concerned with the passage of time anyway. They space out, they work in the realm of feelings, scribbling melodious abstractions that feel familiar. Rich with compassion, harmony, and gestures toward ecstatic—if not objective—truth, it’s full of the sort of pieces that demand you return to them, but sound a bit different each time, new details overtaking familiar comforts. Are you hearing them for the first time? Or just for the first time in a long time? Either way, drift away, and try to remember…