Oblique is the first collaborative album between American musicians and composers Corder and Yantis. It is out now via Flaming Pines. According to the press release, Oblique is a stripped back suite of slippery uncanny minimalism. Centred on Yantis’s improvised saxophone work and Corder’s digital creativity, the album is constructed almost entirely from a single pre-pandemic studio session in Denver and builds on the earlier trio work represented by Jason Corder, Carl Ritger, and Cody Yantis’s album Possession.
Now a duo Corder and Yantis offer a tense and tightly focused set of nail-biting compositions, which sees Corder taking control of Yantis’s saxophone work to paint widely divergent sonic characters. The sax is called upon to deliver heavy abrasive drones, melodic fragments, sharp blasts, gurgles, rumbles and bumps, before twisting and sliding into Justin Forthuber’s percussion work.
Part free-jazz, part soundscape, Oblique is a release full of suspense, the soundtrack to a thriller not yet written. It calls forth the idea of a release but never quite grants it.
Listen below.