Erik Hall – Solo Three

There's something soothing about minimal music - a thoughtful joy that comes from sustained repetition and subtle variation. "Solo Three," the sophisticatedly captivating new album by Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, captures this hypnotic power while reinterpreting a selection of contemporary classical works. Hall's penchant for minimalism began decades ago when he first encountered Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" as a jazz drummer at the University of Michigan. The piece completely changed his career.

Years later, during a creative lull, he took up this formative work again and tried his hand at a new solo composition. Alone in his home studio, Hall worked meticulously to recreate Reich's complex, interlocking architecture, replacing the piece's orchestral sound palette with instruments at his disposal and playing each part himself, without loops, programming or sequencers. This recording, released on Western Vinyl in 2020, was released during the tense first months of lockdown and was well received by listeners. Pitchfork praised it as a "minimalist standard that's exciting to rediscover" and it won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Recording. Even Reich himself wrote to Hall to congratulate him, saying he had 'reinvented the piece'.

With "Solo Three", Hall brings this trilogy to a brilliant conclusion. Rather than focusing on a single composition, he weaves together several works by different visionary composers: Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Spiegel and again Steve Reich. The result is a rich, varied homage to American minimalism - at once reverent and exploratory. Branca's "The Temple of Venus Pt. 1" unfolds in oscillating organ and prepared piano; Palestine's "Strumming Music" becomes a meditative fusion of felt piano and guitar; Spiegel's "A Folk Study" is reinterpreted with acoustic warmth in place of electronics; and Reich's "Music for a Large Ensemble" closes the album with a 16-minute kaleidoscopic frenzy of overlapping melodies and exultant rhythmic patterns.

True to his method, Hall plays and records each part himself, layering the instruments like building blocks of sound. This approach is deeply human and, in times of faceless automation, quietly rebellious. "It's just so much more exciting to play every note yourself," says Hall. "Those tiny differences between takes create a kind of living, breathing magic." This living, breathing magic fills every corner of "Solo Three". It's both a reverent ode to the composers who shaped Hall's musical identity and a vivid reminder that the hypnotic beauty of minimalism - its patience, precision and quiet emotional power - still has an urgent resonance today.