Music Review // Alex Cunningham "Echo's Bones Were Turned to Stone"

https://alexcunningham.bandcamp.com/album/echos-bones-were-turned-to-stone //

This is five songs, so I'd like to think of it as an EP, but some of these songs are pretty long so you could think of it as a long EP or a short LP, depending upon whether you're a glass half full or a glass half empty type of person.   In any case, these songs are all composed and played by Alex Cunningham using only a violin.  I know that sounds crazy, like, how much can a violin do and how could someone sit for this long and listen to only one instrument but Alex Cunningham just makes it work.

When I was younger, my grandfather really wanted my older sister to play the violin for some reason.  My parents ended up buying her a violin which I think is still in my parents' attic somewhere.  I wish my grandfather (or anyone for that matter) wanted me to play an instrument in my youth.  I joined my middle school band and took up the saxophone but I was never any good.  This album, in some ways, makes me wonder what would have happened had I taken up the violin as a kid and stuck with it into my adult years.  Would I be making music like this now?  (Unlikely)

At times this music flutters around like "Flight of the Bumblebee".  Other times, it's intense like the score from a Hitchcock film.   But at the end of it all, what I like most about it are the times when you can just get lost in the sound and forget that it's a violin.  I know it's a violin, you can tell by the way it's being played with the strings and bow, but sometimes you just lose that sense of it feeling so obvious.  Sometimes you just hear music.