Dejing Dejing

Second album for this elusive project: the only clues to who’s behind Dejing are the label’s blurb about an “NYC underground lifer.” That could be quite a few people, by anyone’s reckoning. It’s released on Pat Murano’s Daksina label, which might place it in the No Neck Blues Band orbit, but that’s a pretty big field. It’s lovely stuff, anyway — eleven piano miniatures that repeat, elegantly, with gorgeous little melodic cells that capture the same kind of hazy, nostalgic spirit as Deux Filles, Penguin Café Orchestra, Virginia Astley, and Pascal Comelade. As meditations on loss, they feel unbearably poignant in their understatement; it’s beautiful work that’s unconcerned with any flourishes of ‘expressiveness’; rather, its emotional power lies in what’s unsaid, what sits between these melodies. The inferred and the unspoken.