Maintenance of Way, the latest release from composer and sound artist Dan Siegler, is a comprehensive body of work that shows the established composer and sought-after collaborator stepping boldly into the foreground of a landscape shaped by his life and eclectic career in New York City.

The album’s title is a railway term that describes procedures intended to keep rides navigable and clear and connects to Siegler’s daily New York City commute, as well as to the goal of remaining true to your ideals, i.e., ‘maintaining your way’ of doing things. In Siegler’s case this is a “sound first” approach—gathering field recordings and letting those dictate where the compositions will lead.

Maintenance of Way creates a space where ambient atmospheres and radical transformation coexist. Entrances and exits are pronounced and pointed. The listener is gripped by abrupt but organic shifts of rhythm and tone. Like a subway train emerging on the other side of a tunnel, or out into daylight, the sudden switches in musical surroundings create a feeling of illumination after stretches of darkness. That contrast creates a push/pull dynamic in which no one part can exist without the other.

Siegler strives to locate beauty in dissonance, drawing influence from the likes of Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, David Bowie, and the dense atonal sampling techniques of Wu-Tang Clan and Public Enemy. Steeped in the aura of his native New York City, the music conveys a feeling of disorientation and discovery, like finding a street you’ve never walked down in a place you’ve lived your entire life.

Maintenance of Way is a confident stride into unfamiliar ground. It emits the excited energy of moving beyond a passenger role with a newly defined direction, propelled by a feeling of necessity as if to say, “if not now, when?”

tracklist

1. Spectator Sport

2. Complicated Cat

3. No Party by That Name

4. Ghost Sentence

5. Track Meet

6. For Maike

7. Not a Stable Pattern (live at Art Omi)

8. Read the Following Before Playing (feat String Noise)