Taking cues from Miles Davis’ electric period, the Spacebomb Records founder and Alabama sculptor joins forces on a mesmerizing album rooted in improvisation, risk-taking, and unlikely musical chemistry.
Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection invites direct comparison to one of the most inspired purple patches in modern musical history: Miles Davis’ electric period of the 1970s. The album’s genesis is bold to begin with: In 2018, keen to kick old songwriting habits, Matthew E. White went into the studio with his septet to record a series of improvisational sessions in the spirit of the hard-driving fusion that Davis pursued from 1969’s In A Silent Way to 1975’s Agharta. Inviting the Alabama sculptor and experimental musician Lonnie Holley to add his vocals to the mix was another audacious move, throwing further unpredictability into the works with Holley’s freeform melodies and spontaneous delivery.
Broken Mirror chiefly invites comparison to Davis’ towering 1970 double album Bitches Brew, a record frequently cited by musicians outside the jazz community but rarely recreated. And for good reason: Bitches Brew is so dense, complicated, and inspired that mimicking its white-heat aura feels like a fool’s errand. White’s septet cooks up a thick musical soup whose dense percussive tangles, driving guitar, and almost atonal keyboard stabs are clearly descended from Davis’ masterpiece. So is the record’s improvisational spirit, which relies on modes and gestures rather than chord changes and melodies.
Listening to Broken Mirror, much like its inspiration, requires a kind of recalibration of the musical mind. The record is both ultra-musical in its abundance of ideas and strangely unmusical in its rejection of song structure and repetition, producing a kind of spiraling voodoo funk that swings between gritty and astral. Holley’s vocals, both weathered and sweetly innocent, balance life experience with wonder, gravity with levity, and are ripe with the mesmeric power of understatement. He doesn’t so much sing as emote, hitting emotional targets rather than musical cues. Holley recorded his vocals in a series of first takes after White played him edits of the 2018 septet sessions, and it is striking how well they reflect the album’s various moods.
