Kyle Preston - Vistas
In this collection of neo-classical compositions that breathe with an ambient lift and fall, Vistas by the Seattle based composer and musician Kyle Preston offer a kind of balm at the end of the world. As a sort of self-imposed deadline, this review is way overdue. I found myself coming back to these songs over and over, feeling the need to hear them in different contexts. Walking, reading, laying outside under our massive oak tree, I was drawn to the way these string compositions act like rafts of melody- caught in a strong current or eddied on a shimmering drone or tonal shift. Vistas contains a strong choral feature to it, voices sung in soaring canticles weave their way through the lifting strings.
Sitting in a venn diagram between neo-classical music and ambient washes of sound, fans of artists like A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Sarah Davachi or Wayne Robert Thomas will appreciate the wide-screen approach to this middle way between the two. Individuals who have had some experience with the high holy music of the liturgy will be drawn to this as well - even if these aren’t pulled from that tradition. But there is something liturgical here. Some kind of acknowledgment of something bigger. As someone who was raised in a fundamentalist tradition, responded with reactionary anti-theism who is now somewhere in the middle, these songs awaken a sense that beauty and wonder are self-contained and vital - even if it’s us who are assigning meaning to it.
The musical themes pulling these tracks together should be apparent enough. The song titles, at first glance, disparate, are pulled together to create a poem.
“Without the Scars
I’m Not Sure Who I Am
What Does That Say About Me?
That I’m Broken?
No, There Are No Separate Events
Because Existence Is Relationship
And Scars Aren’t the End
They’re Just the Beginning”
Of the album, Preston had this to say. ”This ambient collection is quite personal to me. These last few years have been hard on a lot of us. The amount of private pain in the world is overwhelming some days. And processing it all with words just isn’t enough (at least for me).
Music makes sense of experience in a way no other medium does. It’s how I process everything. And Vistas is exactly how I chose to interpret what life has felt like — it brought these soundscapes alive in a way that felt necessary. My hope is that they help you process the world in a way that makes sense to you as well.
