AKP Recordings

This latest one from upstate New York sound artist Brendan Principato is a collection of site-specific pieces inspired by field recordings made during a 2023 residency with the Alaska Park Service. Stylistically, Saapato tends to fall a bit too deeply into the “New Age” end of the ambient spectrum to be within my usual comfort zone, but any genre can be compelling if the right artist is involved and Principato is definitely an artist with a compelling vision and the necessary skill to vividly realize it. In keeping with that theme, In Alaska beautifully blurs the lines between field recording and composition to weave an immersive and texturally rich sound world of sloshing waves, rippling streams, and singing birds mingled with elusively hypnagogic and mirage-like synth melodies.

The opening “West Glacier Trail” provides quite an excellent introduction to Principato’s sensuously serene idyll, as I was immediately drawn into a vibrant and absorbing dreamscape of splashing and lapping waves and shimmering synth. Unusually, however, it is the water sounds that are the focus of the piece, as the minimal synth melodies feel warmly spectral and out-of-focus like a distant mirage or the flickering play of sunlight on rippling water. That seamlessly organic and intuitive interplay between natural sounds and Principato’s subtle instrumentation is the heart of the album’s appeal, as he allowed his field recordings to guide his improvisations rather than imposing his own structure or just slapping some wave sounds on  completed ambient compositions like a hack. In fact, Principato had a bit of a nightly ritual in Alaska in which he would religiously listen to each day’s field recordings and improvise along with them while gazing out over a moonlit channel. 

Notably, Principato’s improvisations take some inventively divergent and evocative directions throughout the album. For example, I was initially underwhelmed by the smeared and soft focus music box-like melody of “Ravens,” but the music gradually becomes more jumbled, sputtering, and erratic as it builds towards a pulsing crescendo of multilayered mindfuckery. Then, in the following “6am Rainforest Drone,” the vibrant sounds of a rainforest are soundtracked by little more than an increasingly angelic-sounding bed of shimmering drone. That turns out to be all that the piece needed, as Principato’s sensuously blissed-out thrum evokes a lush rainforest scene of chirping birds, swaying leaves, and gentle breezes bathed in a subtly hallucinatory supernatural glow. 

My favorite piece is one of the less minimal ones, however, as the sounds of gently sloshing water and glimmering synth drones in “Salmon Run” unexpectedly blossom into a gorgeously glassy and dreamlike motif that feels like a hazy soft focus memory of a bittersweet beachside carousel melody. Also, based on the title and the fact that Principato used a hydraphone to record underwater sounds such as a fish, there is an endearingly high probability that he was actively collaborating with a talented (but not individually credited) school of salmon (as well as some curious seagulls).

That nature-centric approach also ensures that even the album’s lesser pieces are a vividly absorbing headphone experience, as the field recordings in “Echo Cove” weave a rich tapestry of crackling, chirping, chattering, and trickling textures that gradually become anchored by a semi-rhythmic squawk. Principato additionally won my heart even more by closing the album with a very non-New Age bit of (entirely justified) misanthropy, as an ugly cacophony of rumbling motors and shouting children briefly disrupts the sublime undersea reverie of “Whale Watching Boats” only to be quickly sucked into a vortex to leave behind only a sun-dappled and crystalline aquatic dreamworld. 

Listen here.