Excerpt from Indy Week article: To make Reveries in the Rift, Westerlund—a devotee of Milford Graves—recruited a small host of collaborators, including multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas (Mountain Goats), improviser Jennifer Curtis, and trombonist Evan Ringel.
At eight tracks, the recording is disciplined and tidy, though each track also manages to feel improvisational—a glittering mosaic of gentle gongs, drones, and textured percussion. At nearly nine minutes, opening track “Ituri Air” is a loping, pacific cosmos unto itself. In listening, the time and space continuum seems to break down, just a liiiiitle bit—a perfect listen for a weird Leap Year weekend.
This is music for deep breaths and meditation, sure, but it also doesn’t need to be confined to a private moment. Perhaps the gift of ambient music like this is that it doesn’t entirely jerk you away from your life; it just makes you pat the ground around you a little harder as you remember where you are.
Reveries in the Rift by Joe Westerlund