On their quixotic sophomore studio effort, Zolder Ellipsis (the Dutch-American band fronted by keyboardist/pianist Tom Aldrich) continues to forge an unorthodox path across stylistic boundaries.
Showcasing different genres and styles from song to song and within songs, "The Book of Tropes" presents a small compendium of musical instruments across the spectrum of experimental/progressive rock and jazz, while also incorporating other fringe/popular idioms into the creative/compositional phase.
Just as medieval composers used “troping” to insert their voices into canonical sacred music, these pieces are both generic and novel. In the words of the American Heritage Dictionary, troping is "the use of a word or phrase modified from its original meaning to another," meaning we're putting all these stylistic techniques into a new context that gives them a new... essence?
Add to that the idea that a trope is essentially symbolic and imaginative (rather than confined to its external form), and you get the idea: not just genre experiments, but pieces with a modern feel that navigate an imaginary seascape.
This time around, the musical approach is more compositionally focused, with the band moving through complex rhythmic textures and dense instrumental counterpoints.
But there's still a good deal of the spontaneous band interplay and improvisational chaos that characterized the previous album, "Entropy Override."
And in a new direction, "The Book of Tropes" features the band's first collaborations with writer extraordinaire Eunsong Kim, the whose lyrics are here transmitted by singer/artist Esther Mugambi.
