"[Peter Kater] brings together tribal grooves, chamber settings, desert atmospheres, sensual melodies and ethereal spaces ....weaving it all together with rich keyboard orchestrations"Twice Grammy-nominated pianist Peter Kater brings you the first of four brand new releases in the Elements Series: Earth.
Elements Series: Earth is lush and bountiful, reverberating with the sacred pulse of the earth. Imbued with gentle rhythms and melodies, luscious strings and a profound silence, the music carries Peter's soulful compositions straight to the heart of the listener.
Earth is another in pianist Peter Kater's introspective four-disc series of ambient chamber works, The Elements Series, also incorporating Water, Fire, and Air. Of the four, Earth is the most organic and folkloric, with Richard Hardy playing bamboo and Native American flutes on several tracks. But the disc also employs synthesizers and the only programmed rhythms of the series with gentle shakers and hand percussion. Earth evokes a pastoral landscape with song titles based on the seasons, making it a concept album within a concept album. "Summer" is light and airy and "Autumn" is shaded in romantic colors. "Spring" is almost country, while "Winter" takes on a darker hue with synthesizer ambiences calling up a chilled landscape. Guitarist Mike Hamilton dominates much of this album, picking out melodies on overdubbed acoustic guitar. While the other CDs in the series have a contemplative tone, Earth almost gets heroic on tracks like "Celestine." As a pianist and composer, Peter Kater can lapse into lounge-jazz and romantic piano idioms, and he kisses that terrain at times on Earth, but there is a new austerity heard in this series that serves him well, putting him on the right side of the sentimental/sublime divide. --John Diliberto
