Eariler in the month we introduced Nice Weather, an ambient project from Philly-based musician Justin Pittney which, as per the artist, looks to explore “the baritone guitar as an environment rather than an instrument.” Named after the filmmaking term for the sounds within a space with no dialogue or intentional noise, lead track ‘Room Tone’ highlighted the potential of such a mission. A song “atmospheric in an almost literal sense,” as we wrote. “A live to tape improvisation which owes equal debts to the work of Mary Lattimore and David Lynch. A soundscape in which apparently empty space carries its own mood and charge, and the contours of sound itself mark out the emotional landscape of a given space.”
Now Nice Weather has returned with brand new track ‘Second Hand’. What Pittney describes as “a document of an improvisation,” performed and recorded live this past January directly to analog tape. Essentially double the length of its predecessor, the song takes the same brooding atmosphere but stretches it as far is it will go. The arrangement is expansive, spare and lonely, the negative space just as much a feature as the instrumentation, as though Pittney is creating not only sound but its dark and mysterious twin. If ‘Room Tone’ carried the ominous air of an empty room in the twilit hours of the day, then ‘Second Hand’ chases those same hours out into a starless dusk. A place where every shadow is long, every sight portentous, and human company few and far between.