Jeff Greinke – Oceanic (Projekt, 2024)
Jeff Greinke’s Oceanic delivers spellbinding ambient electronic music, contemplative New Age, and accessible minimalism genres. Set to be released on February 2, 2024, this album unveils serpentine sounds that gracefully drift along dreamy and somewhat foggy currents in a leisurely-flowing stream of awe.
Representing Jeff Greinke’s 24th album in a remarkable 40-year career and his second release on Projekt Records since his return, Oceanic takes a departure from the post-classical tones of last year’s A Thousand Year Flood. In this project, electronic sounds undergo intricate processing and are often layered to form elaborate textures, chords, and harmonies. The timbres are uniquely crafted, revealing subtle details that capture the emotional ebb and flow, akin to turbulent whirlpools in the briny depths of the ocean, resonating within one’s heart.
As a seasoned artist, Jeff Greinke breaks away from familiar studio patterns, embracing a wild and uninhibited approach in sculpting Oceanic. The outcome is an album designed to immerse the listener in a world of rich harmony and profound texture; a somewhat peculiar yet remarkably splendid exploratory sound.
“These nine compositions,” Jeff reflects, “involve abundant sonic motion with multiple layers moving from side to side, front to back, and at varying speeds and dimensions. This motion conjures large bodies of water with their long rolling waves, strong currents and cross-currents, and big slow moving tides. Hence, the album title Oceanic. That said, there’s also a prominent atmospheric aspect to this work — a common thread for me over the years — lending a mysterious and suspended quality to many of these pieces. In this way I think of more than just large bodies of water; the scenery also includes misty mountains, big clouds, steady rain, the jet stream, and far-off frozen places with massive drifting icebergs.“
“This music comes from a period of intense exploration intended to expand my musical palette through an empirical process of heavily manipulating, treating and then layering sounds. In this way, Oceanic is perhaps my most ‘experimental’ release; not in terms of genre, but in how I used the studio to push my compositions into new sonic realms. The pieces are entirely sample- and synth-based, less minimal, and don’t involve other players. The timbres are not as clear or clean; they’re more smeared and altered. This nine-month period of deeply focused creativity was an immensely exciting and fertile time of discovery for me.”
Jeff will perform live in Tucson, Arizona on Thursday, January 25, 2024. Part of the Desert Drone series.