Lunar Retreat by Lee Clarke

Lee Clarke’s debut album Lunar Retreat pays homage to contemporary threads in beatmaking, jazz, and minimal classical piano music. With collaborative features by Daniel Suun, Ivy Sole, and Jarrett Gilgore (alto sax), Lunar Retreat expands on the timeless compositions and experimental studiocraft that originally brought critical accolades to Clarke’s 2022 beat tape Genes, including Bandcamp Album of the Day.

Though Lunar Retreat is, like most of Lee Clarke’s music, full of a variety of tones, instruments, genres, and emotions, the album is in many ways also a specific meditation on darkness, grief, social distancing, nighttime, and other forms of heaviness and sadness. The album’s title alludes to how the Moon is slowly, imperceptibly moving away from Earth, a celestial metaphor for how grief creeps sometimes. Clarke’s compositions, in particular the dyad of piano compositions ‘Lunar’ and ‘Solar,’ are informed by countless hours of daily practice studying cassette tape recordings of Clarke’s deceased grandmother, the pianist Ahvagene Clarke.

A break up also gave this album its emotional setting. ‘Don’t Wanna Fight’ was originally written as a talisman for summoning optimism in the midst of a relationship facing precarity. What happens to songs like this one after things have fallen apart? Clarke’s approach and re-approach to this song in finalizing Lunar Retreat stand for the strange, shaky confidence that his music in general issues. A way of trusting that growth means loss; distance is a form of relationship; and music can broker resilience in the slow slip. 

Lee Clarke

Philadelphia-based music producer

leeclarke.online
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