TIM STORY - Discography

Beguiled

Contents
Beguiled
Helen of the West
Improbable Landscape
These Few Words
Pale Litany
And Evening Falls
In the Days of Small Sorrows
Her Cathedral
Délires
Eyelids of the Sea
Many Years Pass
The Luminous, the Dark

Nominated for Album of the Year in Adult Contemporary Instrumental in the NAIRD awards. Also reached #9 and spent several months on the Billboard "Top 25" Adult Alternative Music Charts in spring of 1992.

Reviews
"Like a sigh, or a moment without thought that makes things clear, Tim Story's music is potent in its simplicity... Like Erik Satie without the sarcasm, Story injects a sense of ambiguity into his miniatures, suggesting emotions for which there are no words... Story's melodies, played with uncommon delicacy, embody passion at a whisper. Often enhanced by the velvet richness of Martha Reikow's cello, this is graceful, visceral chamber music for 21st-century romantics." -- Pulse, USA
"An absolute masterpiece." W. L. Times, USA
Program Release Notes
Beguile is a unique verb with two almost completely contradictory meanings. The original, almost archaic: to mislead by guile or deceit; more commonly, to charm or delight; to lure; to pass time pleasantly. Tim Story's gently epic soundscapes and brief, intimate, deeply felt modern chamber pieces yield up this kind of richly equivocal meaning.
Story's musical evolution has always plied a steady course. Beguiled, his 6th album in a resolutely consistent recording career spanning over ten years, is the finest realization yet of the musical concerns that have motivated him from the beginning.
Ponder his titles for a moment and it becomes clear. Story is heir to the tradition of ironic miniaturists most famously embodied by French composer Eric Satie. (Harold Budd is a modern example.) Consciously antidramatic, these artists shunned the grandiose formalities and weighty thematics of the German symphonic establishment in favor of complex, highly structured melodic music for solo instruments and small ensembles.
In their use of modest forces they aligned themselves with the chamber music tradition, but here also they departed from the norm; instead of somber introspection they explored the emotional poetics of ambiguity, irreverance, and irony, with fresh, unusual harmonies and subtle, disarming melodies. In this music, what appears simple on first hearing mysteriously expands, enfolds, and ultimately beguiles with time and repetition.
Like his precursors, Story works primarily with vernacular instruments of the day - piano, guitar, and the endlessly malleable timbres of electronic keyboards. Like a good modernist, he sets his delicate dramas in an expanded reverberant soundscape. But his mysterious presence, unqualified emotionality, and taste for the "sublime" mark him as a romantic for the digital era.

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