David Slowing - A Sinuous Path to Pleasant Valley

Released: October 24

On his third album, David Slowing gives the audience more than a bit of music. Rather, he tells us a wordless personal story of moving across the country several times before finally landing somewhere more permanent. While the story plays a big part, it is the variety in the compositions throughout the album that really sell the adventure. The musical influences seem to range from gentle ambient pieces driven by pianos and pads to a more chill vibe inflected with influences of minimal house. It's quite a grab bag of influences that melds together quite well in its narrative format. 

The album opens up with "Sinuous Path," a downtempo compositions with bits of house and tech inserting themselves in the rhythm, a theme that continues in the following track. But then the next two tracks, "Forest of Forgetting" and "Pleasant Valley I" respectively,  take us on a more ambient driven introspective kind of journey by eschewing any kind of percussion and only the most rudimentary rhythms. "Pleasant Valley II" keeps this going for the first half but then returns us to that house-inflected downtempo motif that David finds a musical home in with positively uplifting harmonies attached. Then the end of the album with "Fahnestock," casts that off completely in favor of a single sentimental piano that acts as a slightly moody but satisfied retrospective of the entire album, creating a soft and wonderful ending to the journey.