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Jason Zumpano – Village Lights: Piano 2001​-​2002

Released – 2022

Jason Zumpano – piano, midi instruments

Plunked out on an 80s HP series Roland digital piano in a West End apartment long ago, the remastered tracks in Village Lights evince a musician’s tinkerings wrought into treasure. While playing piano for Destroyer’s early lineup, Jason Zumpano turned out music on the side, an undertaking that produced a tantalising mix of moods, kinesthetic locales, and balancing acts of styles. Imagine Vince Guaraldi jazz under the feet of the Peanuts characters decades later trailing them through marriages, divorces, firings and hirings. Imagine being chased by a bird wearing a mask of your first boss’ face. Picture if you will breezy summations of a sunny afternoon. This is the music of an off-kilter adulthood that remembers innocence and levity while acknowledging the brunt of experience. Through midi-patching the Roland with cello, flute, strings, organ, and harpsichord, Zumpano sketches scenes of subtle fusions: might this track be a nod to Bach’s Three-Part Inventions? Is this a bow to Hitchcockian soundtracks, a curtsy in a courtier dance in some 70s film set in the renaissance, or a kiss blown to the keyboardist in Can? Does this track know that it will someday appear in the documentary Manhattan, Kansas? The sum total of these tracks leads to a reverie of questions. What is certain is that Village Lights is grounded in sensations both playful and profound, where the weight of the world is lightened.

Digital files via Bandcamp

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