For its first two releases, Squidco's brand new in-house digital label, Squid Note Records, has released two of the latest installments in Joel Futterman's growing solo piano oeuvre. Below is a review of the first, Absorb.

Absorb begins with heavy chords and a burst of frenetic energy. The pianist's left hand unsteadily holds a series of jumpy couplets, which frequently break into ascending scales. The right hand rides atop that wave with a fragmented pointillism. The first part (these tracks are simply titled "Absorb" Parts 1-4) maintains this intensity, occasionally breaking into strides, and chordal layers and all out thunder rolls, but always returning to the jolting quasi-leitmotif introduced at the beginning. This is the type of irrepressible forward drive (here lasting just shy of 30 minutes) is what first gripped me when I discovered Futterman, on a solo release no less, 20 years ago. At 80, he's still got it in abundance.

Relentlessness is one approach. However, it often tires quickly for lack of ideas. Not here. Even just in "Absorb Part 1", Futterman lets snippets of his stylistic hoard slip, be they staggered strides, hints of bop, or the lofty dramatic figures that close the piece. After a short stretch of silence, "Absorb Part 2" is inaugurated with a glistening and a billowy statement, but it soon falls into a deep and frenetic rumbling that underlay much of the first piece. What becomes apparent is just how unifying the low-end ersatz-rhythmic push is. It is unstable, but its imperfect repetition grounds the prancing upper keys, in spirit evoking the more outre and visionary percussionists — Sunny Murray, Milford Graves, and the like — who abandoned steady time keeping in favor of inconstant seas of tempo. This combination — explored in different permutations and a different hierarchy of elements in Parts 3 and 4 — refuses the customary fallback onto movements as framing devices in favor of exploring and extending the moment. In another analogy, one could also think of this as the hyper-caffeinated corollary to the irregular, plodding gradualism of late Feldman. It hovers rather than progresses linearly. The ear might at first hear repetition or caprice. After another listen, the repetition proves inexact and the logic behind the flow starts to emerge. Repeated listens reveal other sonic interactions, and links between ideas that are sometimes quite far apart. Those links, of course, form the deeply fascinating core of Absorb.

I recently spoke with Futterman about his history with the piano, but that conversation quickly spun off into topics of our current historical moment, family and the passing of loved ones, aging and inner contentment, and the unevenness of time. It concluded with a final connective thought that brough us back to the music. "No matter what we're doing in life," Futterman noted, "we've got to find some way to make it swing." Fair enough. Futterman certainly does make Absorb swing, though in the most abstract but also maybe purest sense of the term. Just listen.