Multi-instrumentalist and visionary Nate Mercereau’s Sundays, which forges textured, ambient soundscape with multi-may now contend with 2021 Album of the Year candidate Promises from Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Mercereau’s is a mystical, dream-like mesh of sonic tapestries that blend into one another, deceptively complex and eminently simple in their lush bearing at the same time.
The album was born out of his weekly live-streamed performance, built with the producer and instrumentalist, Carlos Nino, another forward thinker, like Mercereau, on the L.A. experimental scene. These are stream-of-consciousness sounds that bear little if any discernible song structure. Instead, it’s like a carpet of sound that just keeps rolling with silent pauses before another soundscape emerges. Or, said another way, ebbs, and flows like ocean waves from a series of different beaches. Or, imagine yourself in the sky as you bounce from one billowing cloud pillow to another.
The album was built over the course of the year in those live stream series with Nino sending a long-form improvisation before the set, with Mercereau creating and improvising along with it in real-time. Mercereau then took the various pieces, molding them into a cohesive whole for this album, adding Jamire Williams (drums) and Josh Johnson (alto sax) to improvise with his edits. The album echoes the kinds of sounds we associate with Brian Eno or to a lesser extent the guitar synth work of Pat Metheny and John Abercrombie. That’s part of what makes this fascinating in that it is not (unlike the Floating Points album) keyboard driven but instead, Mercereau, as he did on 2019’s Joy Techniques, relies on vintage Roland and Korg guitar synths.
To this writer, it feels like one long sustained piece, a journey through the many emotions and thought patterns of the mind as exemplified with titles such as “Every Moment Is the First and Last,” ‘Immersed in the Going,” “…I’ve Always Been Here.” There are ten tracks but the seamless segues bind all together in a cohesive flow. Nonetheless, he did manage to pull two of these out to release as singles.
To best appreciate the music, this is a private listening experience. Find your own space, preferably at night, and let this soundscape envelop you.
