On his third solo album, the New York drummer sheds his earlier records’ conceptual frameworks, marshaling percussive chaos into increasingly controlled forms.
Over the course of three studio albums, Greg Fox’s solo output has become less conceptual. In 2014, Mitral Transmission drew upon experiments using free-jazz drummer Milford Graves’ various bio-sensing apparatuses, which allowed Fox to find music in the natural rhythms of his body. The Gradual Progression, released in 2017, was a richer, headier work, one still intimately connected to process, though the conceit wasn’t as high-minded: Channeling jazz and new age, Fox began working with software called Sensory Percussion, which can turn a drum kit into an electronic controller or sampler, allowing for a broader array of sounds in the mix.
On Contact, there are even fewer formal constraints. Recorded with veteran doom-metal producer Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Six Organs of Admittance) in just two days, the album feels more improvisatory than The Gradual Progression, and more blindingly technical. Fox remains a gifted physical performer, marshaling percussive chaos into increasingly controlled forms—defined rhythmic mutations in cymbal crashes and cool, rolling snare hits. The track titles draw from Buddhist concepts, though Fox admits they’re “somewhat arbitrary”; more than any overarching thematic framework, a freeform, exploratory sensibility guides the album.
There’s a sense, too, of things being stripped back. This is clearest on the three title tracks, which are minimalistic to the point of resembling technical exercises. Fox presents complex rhythms in isolation, without any extraneous samples or production tricks. It’s sonic acupuncture—just Fox and the kit, iterating on a series of patterns to near-therapeutic effect. “Parasthesia” achieves something similar with an opposite tack; occasional blasts of processed, oxidized sound punctuate a sustained ambient tableau, with fewer flourishes and relatively little negative space. Where the three “Contact” tracks are aesthetically austere, “Parasthesia” represents an economy of motion. There’s a bit of that on “Vedana,” too, though the effect is somewhat weaker; the repetitions fatigue more than they entrance.
As indebted to prog as to spiritual jazz, “From the Cessation of What” is the album’s most developed piece, and its most texturally stunning. What begins as something misty and spacious quickly tightens as the drumming becomes more dynamic. With a cascade of bright, percussive plinks, the track becomes almost dialogic; the interplay between the starkness of the kit and the gloss of those sampled tones resembles a kind of conversation. And in the final third, amid psychedelic organ, Fox lets loose, closing with splashy, cathartic release.
The album’s title, Contact, nods to the basic mechanics of drumming: the isolated experience of hitting, rolling, or brushing as a moment of connection. But more than ever, in Fox’s solo catalog, that physical sensation bleeds into the psychic. The relationship between gesture and emotion is newly unmediated, and individual actions evoke worlds. Fox is the lone, many-limbed curator, conjuring sounds and samples in space. And though Contact is mostly a one-man endeavor, the music generates a sense of proximity, of presence. That tension feels both like an ironic reminder of our current isolation and a gesture toward a more communal future.
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