Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver – Steady State LP

"Steady State" is the third album by Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver. They use aluminium bowls, piano and strings to create a combination of shifting resonances, coalescing into other-worldly music that at first appears static, yet constantly shifts and re-grounds itself.

In August 2022, they performed a concert at Tempo Rubato in Melbourne, Australia, premiering two new pieces. They returned to the venue in October of the same year to record the new works, sans audience, taking advantage of the venue's sublime 102-key Stuart & Sons grand concert piano (which Oliver plays on "State"). This album is the result of that session.

"The two sides of Steady State are both deeply conversant and distinct. Steady is fantastic intersection of tonal and textural minimalism, comprising sheets of shifting resonances and timbres produced by Green’s bowed bowls penetrated by Oliver’s sparse interventions on piano, delivered like water drops into a sea of sound. Strikingly emotive within its abstract sensibilities and marked by an aching sense of beauty, across its glacial evolutions each artist meets the other with a striking sense of poetry and restraint. The album’s second piece, State, encounters Oliver leaving the piano behind, and thus the kinds of temporal marking, tonal contrast, and percussiveness encountered through his playing on Steady. Here he meets Green on his own ground, producing a similar sonic palette on violin and bowed banjo to the bowing of heavy aluminium bowls. The outcome is remarkable, intertwining the hallmarks of ambient music and noise, while subtly recalling certain meditative states produced by Indian classical music. Howling, deep, masterful, and intricate, shifting the dynamic expectations of improvised music to hone in on interjections at the microscopic level, it’s an immersive journey that reveals further dimensions with every return listen.