As the coda to a busy and dynamic year, Zakè Drone Recordings is pleased to bring you Certain Path, a collection of piano-centric pieces by friends and frequent collaborators zakè (Zach Frizzell), From Overseas (Kévin Sery), and City of Dawn (Damien Duque). It is an album intended for quiet spaces, deep breaths, and hibernation stillness; across its seven movements, softened and gently treated keys provide compelling motifs, while undercurrents of shifting drone provide a meditative, melancholic universe in which the listener may find license to escape gravity.
While many works by the trio slowly seep into the subconscious, the opening piece, “Where Time Slows Down”, offers an immediate statement of intent: tender in its approach, there is nonetheless a richness of heart-rending beauty and intrigue. Its initial piano loop eases into subtle variations, as Séry’s signature guitar textures waft across the backdrop, tethered by a kitestring to the billowing chords. “Certain Path” is an ode to Frizzell’s wife and raison d’être, who has been an essential inspiration for his prolific contributions to the ambient realm – both as creator and curator – over the past decade. Its delicate theme brims with affection, a memento mori representing any precious instance that might illuminate the gifts of companionship.
In discussing their compositional process, the artists note that Certain Path grew almost exclusively from nocturnal recording sessions, giving it a comforting, shadowy aura, vignetted by the starry-skied unknown. Spiritually akin in many ways to their standout LP, A Sorrow Unrequited (2021), Frizzell and Duque shared piano duties, each beginning with improvisation until arriving at a promising arrangement. At that point, melodies were developed and refined, and passed to Séry, who employed his complex array of pedals and software to add depth, dimension, and dynamics. In various places we also hear the echoes of nebulous field recordings and the grain of analogue tape treatments, each of which adorns the work with poignant detail.
“Avec l'aide de Vincent”, the album’s longest entry, pays tribute to a long-time friend and mentor of Frizzell. Its deliberate, dulcet piano phrases fall around patient pauses, as each chord creates a further tilt of the low light, while each silence captures an eternity waiting at the edges. Séry’s guitars gradually swell to their greatest heights throughout the midsection, at times blurring with the softened attack of the piano felt, blanketing any distinctness along the horizon line with impressionistic, faded pastels.
The serene sway of “Âmes Sœurs” conveys striking beauty in its stripped-back simplicity, using only a four-chord phrase, wisping drone, lonely strings, and distant rustle to achieve grace. “Solemnity”, by contrast, rolls on an ECM-adjacent piano cycle that works with its own internal logic, but offers a degree of unsettled mystery unique to the suite. A slight dissonance, gossamer howl, and weathered crackle combine to create the curious feeling of hearing the beloved LP of a long-passed loved one in a forgotten room of their home.
A final pairing of miniatures, “We Will Find Our Way” and “I Saw You At Night”, brings clear tonality and cautious hope to the album’s somber realm; both are absent of bombast or fanfare, instead invoking a finespun fade into deepest darkness. Where sometimes in these shadows, we might see only omens of finality, Frizzell, Duque, and Sery show us the potential for light to flood back in; resolve is dependent on the love we carry, and Certain Path stands as a reminder that no one of us walks alone.
