ALBUMS // Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Transmissions

Post by Misha

My apartment is full of the sounds of snow melting. A steady metronomic drip on the air conditioning unit in the bedroom window, the occasional harrumph of a large pile of snow hitting the ground, and a sound that is harder to isolate, a combination of bird noises and water trickling from the trees and into the ground, something like glistening.

I’ve never felt that my emotional life was all that tied to seasonal changes, but it’s true that since the winter solstice I started to feel an inexplicable turning. Like a force outside of me was changing for the better, and pulling me along with it. So maybe there’s something to be said for springtime and the season of new beginnings.

All week I’ve been listening to Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his dizzying, decades-spanning, genre-traversing catalogue. Like a lot of people, I only recently learned about Copeland; after 50 years of making music several decades ahead of its time, he was only recently thrust into the spotlight via the endorsement of a prominent Japanese record collector. Now, at 77, he’s enjoying his renaissance. 

‘Transmissions’ serves as a brief tour through the sounds inhabited by Copeland over the years (and there are many). It feels, among other things, like a testament to possibility. Not only to the possibility of finding recognition where and when it’s least expected, but to the depth and breadth of possibility held within a single career.

The music itself is a gift, of course, but so is the way we get to hear it now, five decades of boldness concentrated into several breathless hours of listening. The risks it takes, and the surprises it delivers when taken in all at once, hit harder and more unexpectedly than they perhaps could have had they reached me scattered through the years and evolving in real time, the way I experience most musician’s catalogues.

There’s something about taking in an artist’s career in this way, especially one as dynamic as Copeland’s, that unmires me a bit from the unyielding mud of present-ness. Time moves so slowly when you’re in it, or else screams through in a blur, moving too fast to catch it in the act. Either way, too often it feels that one’s ambitions and accomplishments are moving at off-kilter cadences, incapable of keeping pace with each other.

But as I listen to “Transmissions,” and the snowmelt dripping on the air conditioner, and the birds et al, the relentlessly singular rumble of time and its ceaseless passage falls away. I’m reassured of life’s expansive permissiveness, and the sheer number of seasons it is capable of containing.

Buy Transmissions here.

If you’re interested in learning more about BGC, there’s a documentary about his life called “Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story. I’m not sure if it’s streaming anywhere, but you can find out how to watch it here.