Daniel O’Sullivan and Richard Youngs share a fundamental quality: Both have spent decades making any kind of music they want. We could allot paragraphs relating each man’s exploits and get no further to the merits of Persian Carpets. So, let’s skip the historicizing, simply acknowledge that they have made one other album together (202o’s Twelve Of Hearts), then further admit that LP’s dozen tracks of vocal-forward pop (the duo has called it a doo-wop record) sound complete unlike this one’s two expanses of instrumental composition.
Still, let’s not ignore all the clues. Persian Carpets’ title, which is also the name of each LP side’s sole track, invites consideration of the similarities between Iranian rugs and these two swathes of sound. Persian Carpets was recorded in a day, so it doesn’t live up to any expectations of labor intensity. But other formal qualities of the titular floor coverings are relevant. They’re made of fine, non-synthetic materials; O’Sullivan plays piano and Youngs plays zither. They tend to have a rich colors and intricate designs contained within a bounded space; that’s a pretty good description of the duo’s music.
If you had to name an antecedent for Persian Carpets, it would be the piano music of Charlemagne Palestine. Youngs is a long-standing student and practitioner of minimalism (among many other things), and O’Sullivan has played with Palestine, so the similarity is not accidental. But where Palestine’s repetitive attack on the keys and strings has been known to result in blood on the piano, it doesn’t sound like anyone was hurt during the Persian Carpets session. On the first side, Youngs’ strumming, which sounds quite similar to the sounds you could obtain by playing directly on a piano’s strings, comes on strong, radiating clouds of overtones. O’Sullivan plays one brief phrase after another, repeating each often enough that the music creates an impression of sequential, ascending planes. The pitch rises, the pace flags, the sound gradually thins, and after 22 minutes of bliss, you might say, “That was great. Can I have another?”
And the answer is yes, only this time, the tempo and intensity are ratcheted back and the relationships are inverted. At first Youngs’ sounds seem to flow around O’Sullivan’s phrases with a diffuse quality that brings to mind the more Eno-affected tracks on Laraaji’s Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance. As the piano picks up urgency, Youngs’ presence first solidifies, then recedes. Seeing as we live in a time when merely checking the news can demolish your mood and jack up your body’s fight-or-flight mechanisms, music this comforting is a gift. [VHF]
—Bill Meyer
