New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Michael Beharie's PROMISE is a song cycle of careful hues and dynamic restraint. Breathy flutes, quiet string plucks, and hazy choral atmospheres paint gradients between folk rock, hyper-romantic classical composition, and equatorial dance styles. What coheres is personal and imaginative, moving both emotionally and psychogeographically across borders.
PROMISE is focused and sprawling, a nexus of old memories of place and new places of memory. 'Silo' and Lolo' sound like a walk in a dreamt city --jasmine flowers dropping from sills to streets that overflow with vine-ripe fruits and spacious reverberations of sunshine. 'Red' and 'Thakur' contrast pastoral and digital noise elements, summoning a renaissance fair in a hardware store parking lot. At peak intensity, PROMISE centers Beharie's guiding voice. Softly riotous rock anthems 'For Days' and 'Ghost' are built on chorus-drenched walls of guitar; but where walls are more like neighbors' fences.
Beharie is an improviser (Zs, "Noth"), composer (in duo with Teddy Rankin-Parker, "A hear from your shadow") and solo artist (with releases on Astro Nautico and Shinkoyo).
In contrast with his heavily synthetic past efforts, PROMISE represents a full embrace of organic sound. Beharie's parts for
Laura Cox (flute) and
Charlotte Mundy (voice) of TAK Ensemble establish an uncanny warmth throughout the album. Deep bass flute moments weave and pur through the record - sounds which seeks to emulate the breathy undulations
of the North Indian Bansuri flute but set within western folk harmonies.
Beneath the bones of PROMISE is a commitment to encountering others across boundaries and borders with respect and humility. With lyrics that patiently explore themes of love and intimacy, authenticity, earnestness, and candor, Beharie reminds us of how music can embody vulnerability and an embrace of softness. From interiority into networked communion and back, PROMISE is an affirmation of the refuge of people to people through sound. Like pointing at the sky with a stranger across languages ('Eclipse'), Beharie beckons us to the greater scenario, a soft solicitation for us to rise, meet, and leave one another with wonder, tenderness, and openness to change. Listen to the new single here:
