“‘rice’ is a peculiar name for a musical project. It doesn’t immediately conjure a particular genre or aesthetic (the way, say, ‘Clone Baptism’ or ‘Smoothplay’ might). Its namesake is nonspecific, a staple food eaten in many varieties around the world. It’s a mass noun, encompassing both the many and the one.

“This marriage of the granular and the universal provides an apt metaphor for the music contained here. Stasis and change, unity and difference, background and foreground bleed into one another in a kind of auditory illusion; if you focus on any given part, you hear repetition, and yet the overall impression is one of constant, if gradual, transformation. On the hauntingly noirish ‘A Vast Quantity,’ we hear an obsessively repeated four-note ostinato, a kind of idee fixe which transforms but never entirely leaves the picture. The rhythms here are intricate, interlocking in ways that point towards the deeper architecture undergirding the music. This architecture could be described mathematically, but the music itself does not strike me as ‘mathy’ in the way that term is generally used. Rather, the math is in service to the poetics of the music.

“The power of this music is accumulative: overlapping sonic blocks laid out like blocks in a city street, endlessly repeated, endlessly varied. It is the power of resolution denied over and over again, the sound of searching for something elusive and out-of-reach. This elusiveness invites deep listening, and also intensifies the catharsis provided by the moments of transparency and transition punctuating the larger cycles. One such moment arrives nine minutes into ‘A Vast Quantity,’ when the percussion drops out and we are left with the languorous warmth of the keyboard, its rich, Rhodes-like timbre infinitely suggestive. Quietly, almost sneakily, a refracted version of that four-note motive reasserts itself. It’s a space I could inhabit indefinitely.

“Mark and Toby share a deep musical connection, honed across collaborations in bands like Straya and William Within as well as in a constellation of experimental music contexts growing out of the Six Families collective. Their eclectic influences filter through their work as rice in different ways. Their most overt nod to these influences is in their deconstructed rendition of Frank Ocean’s ‘Pink + White’ [‘On a Slow Move’] which contorts Ocean’s tune into an unexpected shape. Beginning with a dry, static statement of Ocean’s piano theme performed in a kind of canon, the piece takes a turn around three and a half minutes in, when the theme gets transposed up a major sixth and then rather brutally re-imposed over the minor original. The result sounds more Bartok than R&B, but when this theme re-emerges alongside the melody in the final minutes of the song, it has a kind of effortless, buoyant groove that feels deeply earned.

“One could point to other points of reference: the phase music of Steve Reich, various strains of heavy music, and enigmatic contemporary experimentalists like Craig Taborn. Ultimately, though, trying to trace influences for this music—like trying to capture it in words at all—becomes a kind of game that has more to do with the listener than the musicians or the music. This music sounds like none of those influences. It sounds like the rush of season into season. Like a testament. Like a margin approaching its own center. Like a long convergence. Like a busted bike. Like Mark and Toby. Like rice.”

- Mark Mahoney, September 2018