Anawaty/Russell’s Monjour is all about texture.  Imagine a big Jackson Pollock splotch-fest refracted through James Cameron’s 3-D Avatar technology and you’ll get some idea of the kind of deep, teeming aural pool in which these guys invite you to swim.   This is intelligent music created by sound artists who aren't just gifted players and composers but inspired technicians as well. 

I've never been comfortable with assigning contemporary music to genres. The nomenclature is imprecise at best and bluntly misleading most of the time. To assign Monjour to the fuzzy and too-often infertile "ambient" bin is to do it a disservice. Yes, the tunes are often ethereal and sometimes driven more by tone than melody, but this is not simply a dopish spinning-together of the contents of someone's expensive sample collection. Each selection is a complex, controlled, interlinked excursion into terrain that the artists know extremely well. Taken together, the songs of Monjour offer a very interesting journey. It's a gentle, refreshing trip with very few dissonant episodes to challenge the prevailing restorative mood of the album.

One of the more appealing features of Monjour is the interleaving of Asian musical idioms and inflections among the dominant western instrumentation and rhythms. This collection is polycultural in the best musical sense. And there's some really fine playing. "Monjour", the title song, is, like several tracks, leavened by powerfully expressive and challenging flute essays. It's a James Bond theme song in waiting. The sombre piano passage in "Sunset Over Manda Valley" is a reflective digression from the more cheerful music that surrounds the track. The guitar work is exceptional throughout, and the synth programming that provides the backbone of the album is superb in texture and rhythm.

For the musical gourmet, Monjour is a sonic Rijsttafel: so many good things to explore, such a pleasant aftertaste when you're done.

Michael Park
January, 2010