Mark de Clive-Lowe: Past Present, Tone Poems Across Time (digital outlets)

Recently expat composer and keyboard player introduced this album to Elsewhere readers with an interesting essay about how he came to write this tribute to his father.

De Clive-Lowe described his father – who died in 2011 – as strict and overbearing but, looking through his archive of photos and letters when he was in Japan for 20 years from 1953, he came to see a different person, a young man with a zest for life.

The album, recorded in Los Angeles, is a tribute to the men he didn't know in synthesiser and keyboard melodies uncoupled from rhythmic constraints, some inspired by locations in Japan.

It makes for a rather different album than we have been used to from the highly prolific de Clive-Lowe.

One of the generation of young Auckland jazz players in the 1990s influenced by hip-hop – alongside Nathan and Joel Haines, Freebass, the New Loungehead and others – de Clive-Lowe was a self-starter who had his own label (Tap, with producer Andrew Dubber) and a passport he got stamped in Japan (where his New Zealand father met his Japanese mother), South Africa, Cuba, Britain, the United States and various places between.

He took jazz to the dancefloor with electronica and scratching (by Manuel Bundy) and – at 50 – has a catalogue of more than 30 albums of original material and playing/production credits.

Resident in Tokyo, he now offers this very different, instrumental album: “A sonic and intimate journey with my late father Robin de Clive-Lowe top of mind,” he says.

Unlike his jazz and dancefloor albums, the 11 succinct pieces on Past Present are more akin to quieter 1970s progressive music of Edgar Froese, Vangelis (before all the soundtracks), Jean-Michel Jarre, Stomu Yamash'ta and other synth pioneers who explored astral-cum-ambient atmospheres.

The most challenging is Acceptance, a taut and shapeshifting piece of roiling keyboard melodies against a backdrop of synth washes which would fit in the original Bladerunner; a Japanese melody is discreetly discernible in the chiming Forgiveness and Peace earns its title as an embracing balm of warm waves.

Past Present – trickling to a close with the restful Gratitude – finds Mark de Clive-Lowe in a personal space and, without cheap sentimentality, “a journey of discovery, catharsis and healing”.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here