Lynn Avery and Cole Pulice have been collaborators since 2018, first linking up in Minneapolis before hopping to the West Coast to join the Oakland music scene, but they took off on their 2022 debut, To Live & Die in Space & Time. Equally inspired by both Coltranes—John’s beatific overblowing and A Love Supreme’s compact structure, Alice’s ashram-era environments—it was a hit, by ambient jazz standards. It quickly inspired a reissue of Carpet Cocoon, Avery’s early-2020 debut as Iceblink, whose pairing of nylon-string guitar and sound collage turned out to fit perfectly with a Covid-era zeitgeist enamored with field recordings. Meanwhile, the saxophonist Pulice has become a punk grandchild to the Coltrane-Sanders-Ayler father-son-holy ghost equation and put out arguably the best release on Longform Editions, no mean feat.
Phantasy & Reality, the duo’s second full-length collaboration, leans a lot closer to the vision of Avery’s work as Iceblink. Because Pulice has been both boundary-pushing and prolific in the last few years while Avery has released very little, those who’ve followed the former’s career might be surprised by how conventionally lovely Phantasy is compared to Pulice’s pitch-bent odysseys, like 2022’s Avery-featuring Scry. Avery called Carpet Cocoon a “comfort album” to “retreat to during winter,” first putting it out in mid-January 2020 (at the time she lived in Minneapolis, which, unlike the Bay Area, actually has winter). It’s no coincidence Phantasy appears as the days creep towards the solstice, nor that the sun seems to be almost on the other side of the horizon on the album art: This is a cozy record, to be cherished through the dark months.
This time, the reference point isn’t free jazz but the more sedate descendants of that style that emerged on the other side of Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly” in the ’70s. The 2000s work of Harold Budd in particular comes to mind, with the call and response between mournful piano and lonesome choir synth on “Moonlight in an Empty Room” uncannily evoking “The Candied Room” from Budd’s 2000 Atlantic debut The Room, while Pulice’s use of clarinet brings to mind the rosy chamber pieces on Budd’s strongest late-career album, Avalon Sutra. Those wishing Suzanne Kraft had never gone full dream-pop and instead kept on making bleary Balearic fantasies like Passive Aggressive will be delighted by a stretch of songs towards the middle featuring Charlie Bruber, whose upright bass is called on to impart gravitas rather than a rhythmic anchor.
