Fernando Perdomo 2025
Waves 6
Knowing nods and sly smiles get applied to instrumental songs, where words are redundant and six strings turn to party streamers.
Wrapping up the first half of his observations of ebb and tide, Fernando Perdomo couldn’t help but become playful and expand his conceptual horizons to include references to various cultural locales. Not really reflected in music per se, whether on melodic level or arrangement-wise, this move allowed the American composer to shed, via assigning alluring titles to another set of ten pieces, a revelatory light on the thinking behind them. While "Waves 5" seemed to have emerged from a single point, that album’s follow-up draws ideas from different places and often adds a slightly humorous twist to the outcome, so such a paradigm shift resulted in stylistic diversity, which should keep the listener focused and entertained in equal measure.
However, for every delectable detail of sonic landscapes offered through the elegiac perspectives of “The Deep,” where raga resonances augment guitar lines to inhabit stereo panorama and steer steady beat towards a cathartic coda, and opener “Heavenly Rainbow,” which is solemn in a reverie way, there’s a truly rapturous number to rivet the audience. First of all, it’s the blistering, country-tinctured “Bob Dylan’s 115th Tweet” that might well be Fern’s best-ever number, yet the industrially psychedelic, insistently chiming “Magic Alex” – apparently, a fantastic character study of a certain Mr. Mardas – feels arresting too. And though the spaced-out “Utopians,” which evokes the in-your-face art-rock of the ensemble Perdomo’s hero Todd Rundgren used to front, and the fiercely expansive “Theme From ‘The Unpopular Prog Show'” steal the scene from “Oscillations,” whose synthesizers-sculpted pulses get streamlined by organ before the master’s fingers touch his frets and go brooding, the riff-stricken, if still panoramic, “Mustangs In The Wild” paints no less impressive picture of ultimate freedom.
Surprisingly, “Variations On A Dream” discards its ruminative intent in favor of a mighty rumble to clean the palate for the piano-anchored “Lick My Pumps Luv” which lights its torch magnificence and send the album off into the sunset. The album that’s a milestone on one composer’s ambitious endeavor.
*****
