Sam Perkin: Flow album review – Pass the joint

A first hearing of the opening accented note of Sam Perkin’s Flow for violin, viola and cello of 2018 brings to mind the start of Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony Op 9 of 1906. The connection is momentary and fleeting.

Schoenberg moved on quickly to swell into an affirmative chord before launching into angular writing of sometimes riotous energy. Perkin hones in on the gesture, treats it as a core idea to be repeated, contemplated and adored, before morphing into a slow-motion version of the kind of work György Ligeti characterised as clock pieces.

Through all the elaborations that follow, the underlying motion of Flow, such as it is, is glacial by comparison with Schoenberg. Time is stilled. The album’s much longer second piece, Suburban Distortion (2021, 27 mins vs 13) is for “Electric Guitar (Distortion), Electric Guitar (Clean), Acoustic Guitar”, all played by Perkin himself.

It moves as slowly as a a sunflower rotating under the sun, and sounds like a 21st-century, new-age flavoured revisiting of early minimalism.

The focus in a washy acoustic is on guitar tone colours and textures – strumming that fades in and out, with drifting whorls of distortion that also come and go. Pass the joint.