Mark Isham
Castalia

Who knows how many times you've listened to Mark Isham's music without realizing it. Especially if you often go to the cinema, considering this musician has over a hundred soundtracks under his belt, composed from 1983 to today. Born in New York but soon moving with his family to San Francisco, Mark Isham is a trumpet virtuoso who pairs his skills with generous doses of electronics. "Castalia," released in 1988, is a representative example of his style, atmospheric music with very elegant sounds and great formal care.

His fourth studio album features the participation of numerous guest musicians who alone are enough to identify the music encountered here: among others, David Torn, a boundary-pushing guitarist; Mick Karn, former bassist for Japan; Terry Bozzio and Patrick O'Hearn, respectively on drums and bass, both of whom played with Frank Zappa (as well as in Missing Persons, which we have already discussed). Moreover, Isham himself has participated in his career in works by artists of varied inspiration, from Van Morrison to Ziggy Marley, from David Sylvian to Tanita Tikaram.

But "Castalia" remains a very personal album in which the trumpet sounds are always at the forefront: with its natural tone or with a mute, filtered via MIDI or alternated with the flugelhorn, Isham makes it the voice of crystalline melodies that span the album's seven tracks. Sometimes lively and alluring as in the opening track, "The Grand Parade", sometimes rich and more complex as in "Tales From The Maidan" or "A Dream Of Three Acrobats".

The previously mentioned session men also have significant roles, for example in "A Meeting With The Parabolist", a 13-minute track with a highly detailed structure where there's an alternation between fullness and emptiness, between sonic rarification and saturation. But the entire album as a whole simply showcases the class and musical talents of Mark Isham and his companions: nothing surprising, if it's true that the title of the work, "Castalia," refers to the mythological spring of Mount Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses and considered a source of inspiration.