Fernando Perdomo 2026
Clouds 7
Entering transparency, the American composer commits his multi-instrumental soaring to minimalistic ambience.
There are quite a few types of clouds: some of them are redolent of more material objects, others are spread across the skies like fine skeins or something even less tangible in visual sense – and it’s the latter type of this aerial water that Fernando Perdomo decided to access on the seventh installment of his second saga. Whereas "Clouds 6" offered a deliberate reflection of tiredness, its successor proposes, via a series of the melodic savant’s delicate strokes, a wide-eyed awe inspired by the afternoon depicted on this album’s cover. Despite being a master of the finely formed tune, he doesn’t pursue clear eloquence here, resorting instead to a more avant-garde treatment of note sequences.
Well aware that the titular formations consist of water, rather than of vapor, Fernando chose to start this half-hour flight with “Droplets,” which emerges from silence in a fittingly fluid way, each muscular touch of his fingers on the strings echoing in a barely-there chord of ivories, before the piece gains a measured momentum to inform the chiseled drive “The Happy Day” takes further towards sweet bliss. So while “Swell Season” fluctuates dynamically to sculpt a sentimental disturbance of a summery kind, vibrant yet almost abstract, although there’s a hint of a tentative song at the end, “Tranquility” opts for a soothing presence, Perdomo’s plucking of sounds pouring balm on the listener’s soul. But then, the glissando-exploring “Texture” and the pointillistic, scale-stepping “Patterns” suggest a somewhat technical, albeit still majestic, approach to the player’s treatment of the mood, and “The Ether” searches for wonders in synthetic sonics the guitar passages merely punctuate.
Yet if “Up” comes across as an exercise in celestial ascension of a fretboard, the effects-laden “Daffodil” feels otherworldly enough to evoke a delicious daydream, and “At Heavens Door” – the only track here to reach for a five-minute mark – delivers an unassumingly cathartic finale. “Cloud 7” may seem atypical in the context of the overall album cycle, but it provides a tasty contrast to the chapters that bookend these ten cuts and stands out, ethereally so, as a solid work – a gripping paradox.
****4/5
