Colin Fisher – Suns of the Heart

Colin Fisher is a sought-after musician on the serious, avant-garde North American improv scene. The eclectic Torontonian, who also happens to be an excellent multi-instrumentalist (guitar, sax, bass, percussion, Middle Eastern tanbur) thrives equally well in contexts of free jazz, ambient electro, avant-rock and whatever else lies in the interstices. Suns of the Heart is his sixth solo album, and a remarkable one at that. 

Through a symphony of sound triturations that sculpt into a reconstructed language the multiple sonorities extracted from the aforementioned instrumental panoply, Fisher creates a superb, rich and complete universe, sometimes luminous (Terra Lucida), sometimes sorrowful (Illuminato Matutina, reminiscent of Morton Feldman). The Fisher style on Suns of the Heart sounds like a happy marriage of musique concrète and electro ambient, with a preference for pointillist, airy guitar textures. The majority of the pieces exude a feeling of lightness, but also of lace-like abstraction, as if the suggested weightlessness were experienced in an iridescent interstellar cloud dotted with luminous scintillations. In this sense, Suns of the Heart represents an evolution from Fisher’s previous album, Reflections of the Invisible World (also excellent). The latter placed the impros (guitars, saxes) on a sustained, continuous cushion of sound. This is much less the case here, where the timbral percolations stand on their own, and are fleshed out and interwoven enough not to need a ‘’secure’’ backing.

If Clapton were distilled then dispersed through a prismatic crystal, that’s pretty much what we’d have in terms of guitar sounds. The rest is way beyond.

The album is produced by another exciting Torontonian and master cum electro: David Psutka (ACT!, Egyptrixx, Ceramic TL). 

Highly recommended.