Low Light Situations - Office Romance CS (2010)

Misery may love company but the reverse is true as well. And few improv-y crews are as adept at coaxing delicious smoky noir heartbreak as City Terrace quartet Low Light Situations. It only takes a couple turtlenecks, two beards, three folding chairs, one clarinet, and a single sizzle-chain for these itinerant east LA session players to slow-roast a set’s worth of mesmerizing instrumental reverb chamber mystery-jazz. Whispery percussion, piano bar bass noodles, echo-twang guitar spiderwebs, and twilit ivory tickling slow-dance and romance in a tall-ceilinged hall of mirrors, occasionally spilling over into passages of dissonant drama or hushed emptiness. A great sustained mood melodrama parsed into six subtle micro-movements.