Derek Hunter Wilson's Sculptures Sounds like the Pacific Northwest Coast

"The cover of Portland composer Derek Hunter Wilson's new album, Sculptures, finds gentle interplay between built and natural worlds. Brushy ferns and evergreens peek through an opening in moss-flecked concrete structures-nature is framed and partially obscured, a snapshot in time. The Beacon Sound release is defined by its gentle grief and regional focus. Here, coastal landscapes emerge from the vantage point of the musician's memories."

""Making these pieces felt kind of sculptural to me," Wilson explains. "I had this big block of marble-a loop or section I took from one of the rehearsals-and I was trying to figure out what that block wanted to be. How do I want to shape it?" He describes the album as an "inward journey of processing a lot of different heavy things," focus seeping through in the record's misty, mournful atmosphere."

"On Sculptures, Wilson's genre-swirling palette-experimental, ambient-classical, a little New Agey-centers his experience of grief following his father's death and memories of the Pacific Northwest coastline that's been a dear friend to him. The result is a sonic estuary. Sculptures ' waters mix and meld, blending piano phrases with drifting string instrumentation and dissolving electronic textures. You need not have conservatory training to appreciate the ways Wilson's pieces ebb and flow."

Portland composer Derek Hunter Wilson assembled Sculptures from improvised rehearsal snippets with harpist Joshua Ward, shaping loops into six sculptural pieces. The album centers grief after the loss of Wilson's father alongside memories of the Pacific Northwest coastline, yielding a misty, mournful atmosphere. The music blends experimental, ambient-classical, and New Age-tinged elements, combining piano phrases, drifting strings, and dissolving electronic textures into a sonic estuary. The cover imagery echoes the interplay of built and natural worlds, and a companion poem by Mathias Svalina extends the album's uncanny, naturalistic language.

Read at Portland Mercury