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Finally, the rest of us can fall in love with Adam Forkner, too.
by Michael Byrne of the Willamette Week:
White Rainbow Zome (States Rights)
[ELECTRONICA] A love letter of sound: 42 minutes of time slowing into a suspended musical mirror-image of the place where everything between two people is gentle, sanguine and sovereign. This is Adam Forkner a.k.a. White Rainbow's four-song release Zome, an album created three years ago for Honey Owens (of Jackie-O Motherfucker, Nudge and World), not us. But now, copy in hand, I confess: I am, myself, falling in love with White Rainbow.
We're shuffled into Forkner's Zome by "Gilded Golden Ladies," a soporific play in psych folk that pushes its weave of gentle vocals and rolling guitar delays forward with the slightest of cymbal tapping. For a musician who's been most often at the fringe with chopped and twisted electronica, it's unexpectedly demure, a feeling of dropping a feather onto the still surface of an indie-rock pond. Those slight ripples continue on through the second song, "How High a Ridge I Could Climb," but the delay effects lengthen, the melodies turn to repetition, and Forkner's vocals turn from words to sound. It's a hint at the suspension to come on the title track. On "Zome" the sounds remain the same—the shimmering guitar voices, the echoing synth—and there's a reference back to the album's melodic beginning. But it's elevated into an ambient polyphony, free of the subtle beats and rhythms of the prior three song, and the temporal constraints of vocals, as unnecessary here as they would be on the moon. The song's an arbitrary 20 minutes long: It could be stretched forever or be over in a moment, encapsulating not a period, but a sense. And even without being a part of Honey Owens' or Adam Forkner's little world, Zome gives enough of that sense to make us bow down to the power of love. MICHAEL BYRNE.
White Rainbow plays with Bonus and Argumentix, Sunday, Feb. 19, at Holocene. 9 pm. Free. 21+.
