Crafted using an astounding list of electronic instruments from Moog, Sequential, Nord and modular synthesizers, each piece moves fluidly from beat to beat, melody to melody, never staying in one place for long. Illusive, Kelly David’s second release for Portland-based record label Spotted Peccary Music (SPM), expands the ethereal, sylvan sound of his previous album Meditation in Green. Like its predecessor, Illusive revels in natural beauty, blending wilderness samples with luminous synths and psychedelic textures. Illusive, however, dwells as much in internal landscapes as external ones. Reflective, introspective, yet filled with wonder.

In high school, Kelly was heavily influenced by the music of Frank Zappa. Through Frank Zappa interviews in magazines and newspapers, Kelly learned about the music of Stockhausen, Varese and other 20th century masters who provided a first direction to Kelly in electronic music. After a move “out west” to Denver in 1997, Kelly met Tucson’s ambient and electronic music master, Steve Roach. They subsequently developed a personal and professional kinship. Steve mixed and produced Kelly’s first album, Broken Voyage in 2002 and mastered and added spatial enhancements to Kelly’s 2006 release, Angkor. In 2014, Kelly collaborated with Steve on an album called The Long Night. Meditation in Green is Kelly’s first release for Spotted Peccary, and Illusive is the second.

From the opening vocal-like phrases to the last crash of the waves, this new album is a voyage of granular organic electronic instrumental music. Illusive has seven tracks and provides an engaging flow, the sonic events constantly change and smoothly lead into new situations and discoveries. There are delicate details, vast quiet spaces and sweeping motion which keeps the listener pleasantly guessing and glowing. The sounds are not natural, with a few exceptions: some birds, some water, and there are probably some more mysterious field recordings hidden in the mix, which any great chef understandably celebrates without revealing all of his kitchen secrets. The most prominent ingredients are calm and curious. By the end of this album, the listener is left with a feeling of quiet uplift, knowing the world renews and a sense of hope will prevail.

The composer, Kelly David, graciously shares some insight into his motivations: “This is definitely my pandemic album. I started on the album in March of 2020 and finished a year later. My excursions into my studio became an escape from the uncertainty, fear and madness of the outside world over the last year…this was a translation of the peace I was seeking within myself.”

The musician continues. “The title Illusive is an adjective that derives from 17th century Latin. It means “based on or producing illusion.” As I worked on the music I was aware of shifts in darkness and light, tensions releasing into pleasing harmonies. As I grew closer to the finish, I began to listen to the tracks as a whole concept. I then realized that all of the tracks hung together through this essential peaceful quality that formed the core of each track with a delicate quality I was not consciously aware of during the writing . While I asked musical questions and provided musical answers, an essential quiet and peaceful quality kept pushing through.

“To me, this is certainly an ambient album, although there is quite a lot of movement underneath the ambient. It is always about change. No sound or combination of sounds remain the same for long. There is constant, subtle change. Illusive is an album that many will want to sleep with as the music invites dreaming.”

As the project took form, “I began with some predetermined compositional structure for each piece. Mostly, it was a set of harmonic materials, namely a reliance on the subset modes of the major scales. Sometimes I modulated between different harmonic modes in the same piece. The modes often impact the emotional quality of a track as some modes are inherently sad or create a feeling of longing.

“In writing Illusive, I relied on a more complex harmonic structure than my previous album. I focused on the harmonic modes, both major and minor, to form the unifying harmonic structure. In several pieces, I wove several different modes into the same track. Also I deliberately created more space between sections, allowing silence to seep in throughout the album. What is consistent throughout my music is the use of my field recordings, the recorded natural environments range from deep woods recorded at midnight to a wave-pounding subtropical sea shore.

“Once I reached the point in recording the album where I recognized the quiet delicacy in the music, images of impressionist visual art came to mind: distinct and varied colors, often with the softness of water colors and then deeper, darker waters that flowed deep inside the music.”

Although illusions distort our perception of reality, they are generally shared by most people, thus resulting in fine art. What you will encounter are castles in the air, an array of illusions of hearing, exploring mysterious technologies that allow the composer to construct new worlds inside your headphones. This music invites us to consider the experience of discovering phantom objects and the realization that this entire gigantic gallery is artificial, designed for celebrating curiosity, and showing how to find inspiration for many of our possible futures.

Natural laws are different in this new place. The wilderness ahead is nothing like what we know on our home planet. The night fogs here are chromatically rich and endowed with vast electronic string and choral apparitions. The surroundings are vast and there is a watchman in the haunted tower, “Sentinel” (9:20) opens the voyage, exploring crafted hallucinations and invented soundscapes never before attempted. Later there is something like drumming coming from the distance, with melodic swirling fragments.

There is a tiny bit of a street in Oahu, where on a vacation in a house there, Kelly David recorded some of the themes that appear in “Palione” (9:54). Whilst presiding in the soft and brilliant foliage of this strange world, around a salt water pool, his peaceful and serene themes flow along from there past here. A bubbling form of electronic percussion emerges briefly, followed by beams of celestial color and reverberation, sometimes I can hear something like gulls in the distance, avian phantasms.

Distance is a relational measurement of how far apart objects or points are. Our path can be seen from great reaches, providing a deceptive appearance or impression of infinity. There are cycles of activity that rise and fall, there are occasional breezes and passing birds that are unlike anything that I have ever heard before, and then through the furthest trees I can hear the open sea, suggesting blue waters shimmering beneath the brazen sun. “Distance” (7:33) is an illusion of space, which changes as perspective adjusts. As I near the confines of the imaginary forest I see before me, between the grove and the open sea, a broad expanse of meadow land. As I am about to emerge from the shadows of the strange trees, a sight meets my eyes and ignites new wonderment for the beauties in this fantastic expanding landscape.

All of these elements are woven throughout these sonic stories. This track starts off with a sense of building energy just below the surface. Delicate reverberations and sparkling sprites cavort beneath fog horns that call darkly out to the vast quiet ocean. These sound like jungle birds hidden in the magical foliage. Behold the “Garden of the Forgotten” (5:19), as one turns their glance in any direction the garth has the appearance at a little distance of a vast, high-ceiled chamber. Hear the choirs of neo-electronic ignis fatuus, perhaps something like the terrestrial the will-o’-the-wisp, performing various lilting calls in the arboreal canopies. Tension builds and eventually releases as the passing elements reflect strangely changing colors.

As far aloft as I can see the stems and branches and twigs are smooth and highly polished and filled with brilliant, nameless birds. I call them birds since they are winged, but mortal ears have never rested upon such odd, unearthly shapes. “Top of the Trees” (8:03) is where the phantom blooms cluster thickly upon these strange branches and may not be described in any earthly tongue. Do these exotic steamy tropics have a variety of snowflakes? Something sparkly is decorating the breezes above.

The definition of ether is the sky, used especially when describing electronic signals that travel through the air. “Into The Ether” (12:25) brings a gentle taste of ether, or æther, the mysterious substance once thought to suffuse the universe. This track’s title might suggest something disappearing into nothing, like a specter of pure fantasy. The motion of the music is like a heat mirage, swaying and shimmering in plain sight off in the distance ahead, guarding the facts while lulling the urgencies of the daily hubble-bubble. Through the entire duration of this track there is the sense of a grand piano reverberating continuously, sort of glowing on and on without diminishing, guarding your dreamscape and allowing for a more complete escape.

The final track breaks open the box and leaves clues to follow into new territory, again! Further go our ears, receiving whispered reports of alien lands and never before encountered ways of being. Is the music coming up from the ocean depths or floating down from the distant heavens? I hear the surf on the shore, an oceanic heartbeat. I hear the call and response echoes of electronic cryptids reeling in the trackless regions of interplanetary space. “Northcoast” (15:52) mixes the rise and fall of oceanic planetary life with the distant horns of the angels. Along the way in one place I hear a lonely harmonica coming from somewhere in the caverns below. I find that my senses have been absorbed by inspiring visions of phosphorescent notes from the depths of the earth while looking right up into the night sky over the open waters. Later we discover clouds of artificial cicadas in those oceanic caves.

The music of Illusive is part of an ongoing process, learning to rotate, scale, skew, transfigure or translate a sonic chorus of disparate elements, a guide for cataloging the ideas about distant intelligent life in the universe, inviting adventurers to traverse the trackless void at will, coming and going between the countless planets. I have a love of expansive time, containing wide, open-voiced chords and things that suggest foreign auditory phantoms, using a technology that lies beyond our horizons, perhaps the technology of para-physical forces.

Kelly David has a small but growing handful of unique albums which explore these experiences of constant synthetic metamorphosis, he is pioneering a new form of organic electronic ambient audio arts. His first album with Spotted Peccary Music, Meditation in Green (2019) is a continuation of a musical journey that began with Kelly’s independently released first album, Broken Voyage (2002), mixed and produced by Steve Roach. On his second independent album, Angkor (2006), the sounds came from a first reflection of Asian travels and deep fascination, both academic and experiential, of the ancient Khmer civilization that dominated SE Asia in the 10th century. Steve Roach mastered Angkor, contributing his sonic treatment to the mixes. After that, for a shared album, The Long Night (2014), is a full-on collaboration with Steve where they worked “side by side” in Kelly’s Denver studio and Steve’s Arizona studio, creating a deep work meant for the virtual dead of night. Kelly reflects, “Steve Roach opened the door for me and showed me how to walk through it.”

With Illusive, the listener finds a sonic sanctuary, appreciating both our natural and synthetic worlds. Illusive is a meditation on the endurance of beauty through troubled times. As these seven pieces morph from melody to melody—traversing stark silences and warm crescendos, cavernous atmospheres and celestial chimes—change is constant, yet graceful.

Mastered by Howard Givens, Illusive is available for physical purchase in CD format and in 24-BIT AUDIOPHILE, CD QUALITY LOSSLESS, MP3 and streaming formats. The CD version of Illusive arrives in a factory sealed 6-panel gatefold package that includes vibrant artwork, liner notes, a 4-page booklet, and artful package design by Daniel Pipitone.

Tracklist:
1 Sentinel
2 Palione
3 Distance
4 Garden of the Forgotten
5 Top of the Trees
6 Into The Ether
7 Northcoast

About Spotted Peccary Music:
Portland-based Spotted Peccary Music is North America’s finest independent record label with a focus on deep, vast and introspective soundscapes. For over three decades, the artists of Spotted Peccary have been on a mission to develop, produce, publish and release ultra-high-quality, deep-listening experiences that engage the listener and exceed expectations. Every release is carefully prepared in a variety of high quality formats from MP3 to high-res studio masters. Explore more than 165 titles and 45 artists at www.SpottedPeccary.com and www.AmbientElectronic.com.

Links:

Have a listen: https://orcd.co/illusive
The Artist: https://kellydavid.com/
Artist Bandcamp: https://kellydavid.bandcamp.com/
Spotted Peccary Album Page: https://spottedpeccary.com/shop/illusive/
CD unboxing video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcG-280CeZE
Bandcamp: https://ambientelectronic.bandcamp.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spottedpeccary/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/spottedpeccary