Review: Patrick Grant’s ‘A Sequence of Waves’ Has Brilliant Baroque Madness

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New York City’s Patrick Grant has released his latest collection, A Sequence of Waves (twelve stories and a dream), on August 24.

These thirteen instrumental tracks encompass Grant’s enigmatic songwriting style, blending together progressive, classical, and indie music to demonstrate his sweeping vision. Surreal tracks “Lucid Intervals” and “Driving Patterns” lay out the canvass for a cinematic journey that spirals into classic rock (“Prelude I/II”), baroque madness (“Alcohol”), and dreamy Americana (“Lonely Ride Coney Island”).

Bombastic yet minimalist, retro-fused yet completely new, Patrick Grant’s A Sequence of Waves is definitely a record anyone should check out.

Patrick Grant is a composer/performer living in New York City and creates music for a wide range of media. A native of Detroit, MI, he moved to NYC in the mid-80s where he studied at the Juilliard School, worked on the production team for composer John Cage, and produced his first recordings at the studios of Philip Glass. He spearheaded the compositional element of an international project for the Millennium which had him working with Billy Joel and Quincy Jones. Interest in world music brought him to Bali three times to study the gamelan which manifested itself in his work through the use of alternative tunings, ensembles with multiple keyboards, and in his work with Robert Fripp (King Crimson, Brian Eno, David Bowie) & The Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists. He was host of the internationally acclaimed podcast Strings and Things.

 His works are a synthesis of classical, popular, and world musical styles that have found place in concert halls, film, theater, dance, and visual media over three continents. Over the last three decades, his music has moved from post-punk and classically bent post-minimal styles, through Balinese-inspired gamelan and microtonality, to ambient, electronic soundscapes involving many layers of acoustic and electronically amplified instruments.