Almost Waking

Though Fratti and Orcutt are never playing in the same room, it sounds like they’re actively responding to each other, rising and falling in tandem, listening and adapting to the atmosphere they’re creating in real time.

While Almost Waking feels like an aside for Fratti and Orcutt, both are reframed in this wonderfully alive-sounding album.

Fratti’s arrangements tiptoe around Orcutt’s jagged idiosyncrasies, creating a melodically rich, soothing yet robustly physical sound that often resembles chamber music that happens to have a healthy lining of dirt under its nails, and which manages to sound simultaneously unvarnished in its uncluttered directness and nuanced in its alluring detail.