David Torn - Only Sky (2015)

David Torn - ever-intrepid guitarist, producer, improviser, film composer and soundscape artist - returns with 'only sky', an album that explores the far sonic edges of what one man and a guitar can create, a solo recording of almost orchestral atmosphere.
It is Torn's first ECM release since 2007's acclaimed 'prezens', a full-band project (with Tim Berne, Craig Taborn and Tom Rainey) that Jazzwise described as "a vibrating collage full of shimmering sonic shapes, a dark, urban electronic soundscape - a potent mix of jazz, free-form rock and technology that is both demanding and rewarding." Many of those same descriptors apply to 'only sky', with its hovering ambient shadows and vaulting flashes of light, its channeling of deep country/blues memories and Burroughsian dreams of North Africa.

Recorded in the acoustically apt hall of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in upstate New York (and then sorted and mixed in Torn's own mad-scientist lair), 'only sky' is an album to get lost in, over and again.

David Torn's initial ECM album was 'Best Laid Plans' (1984); and he also featured on Jan Garbarek's 'It's OK to Listen to the Gray Voice' before recording his vintage 'Cloud About Mercury', with trumpeter Mark Isham and the latter-day King Crimson rhythm section of Tony Levin and Bill Bruford. More recently, Torn produced and mixed Tim Berne's ECM albums 'Shadow Man' and 'You've Been Watching Me'.

Torn's film scores include those for 'Friday Night Lights', 'Lars and the Real Girl', 'Believe in Me' and 'The Order'. He has also contributed tones and textures to scores by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Carter Burwell and Mark Isham, and his sounds can be heard in the Academy Award winners 'Traffic' and 'The Departed'.