'Phase' by Jack Garratt

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Phase
By Jack Garratt
Release Date: 19th February 2016


Tracklist: Coalesce (Synesthesia Pt. II) / Breathe Life / Far Cry / Weathered / Worry / The Love You’re Given / I Know All What I Do / Surprise Yourself / Chemical / Fire / Synesthesia Pt. III / My House Is Your Home
(Deluxe: Falling / Water / I couldn’t Want You Anyway / Remnants / Synesthesia Pt. I / Lonesome Valley / Water – Acoustic)


The Love You’re Given was the first track I heard by Jack Garratt. I found it just before I moved to Berlin and fell in love with it. At first I just listened, without any motive or ideas as to the song. But when you're listening to it and trying to define the track as to genre, it gets difficult. There's so much going on in each of the tracks in Phase, so many sounds that draw you in to the soundscape that he creates within each one. The sample in The Love You're Given is what initially drew me in to the track, along with the accompanying chordal piano line. These additions may be small but add so much to the track. There are so many elements and intricacies that he incorporates within the album that you can never hear all of them, with every new listen you hear something new and unheard. 
The series of tracks titled Synesthesia (parts I, II and III) are some of the most interesting tracks on the album. After reading an interview with Jack Garratt through Interview Magazine, it becomes a lot clearer as to the idea and meaning behind this little series within the album. Synesthesia is joined perception, so one sense is perceived with another – quite commonly it’s seeing colours when you hear certain sounds or certain words being certain colours, and “some rare cases where people will see other people hugging and feel like they’re being hugged”. Wassily Kandinsky, a well-known Russian painter, would hear sounds when he saw certain colours so in a way as he painted he would hear his paintings come to life. From the interview, this phenomenon is what Jack Garratt has tried to create. “For me, the idea was that I’d like to make a collection of music that would encourage synaesthesia to come out of people.” His motives towards this idea became more obvious after this explanation: “big and chaotic and big, sweeping, romantic scores, because I wanted to evoke that kind of emotion, that chemical imbalance, just to see if it was possible to trigger [synaesthesia]”. This is something that I really noticed while I was listening, the tracks are much more experimental with some really interesting and interactive elements that have been incorporated, even really simple techniques such as panning the sounds between speakers to capture your attention and that makes the music that little bit more interesting.
If we put aside the prominent electronic elements for a second and listen to how many lush traditional elements there are incorporated, it demonstrates how diverse the album is and how diverse Jack Garratt as a musician is. My House Is Your Home is the epitome of the traditional elements of the album – a raw piano track. On a first listen, it’s a major reminder of James Blake’s track Limit To Your Love – although that track isn’t completely stripped down to it’s initial raw recording and does still include electronic elements, it’s main theme and instrument is the piano. My House Is Your Home is recorded in a way that it makes you feel as though you are there as he recorded it, everything you’d be able to hear in an acoustic environment is present in the sound – the pedals of the piano being pushed and released, the creaking of the stool, the press of the keys, the white noise of the environment surrounding him as he plays (although that could be on me with bad speakers), nevertheless it’s a brilliant final track that shows how good of an instrumentalist he is as well.
Phase is full of all of these quirky, lush, and interesting elements that means there is so much for me to say/write about this album – probably too much – so we’ll leave it there. Wait, one last thing, if you haven’t figured out the purpose of me writing this post, here's a little summary: “It’s a brilliant, and brilliantly diverse album, and I still haven’t stopped listening to it since it was released in February. So, you guys should definitely go and listen to it, and keep listening to it until your heart’s content - it might be a while."






Charlotte

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