Volume 3 completes Secular Music Group’s trilogy for Love All Day by doing the opposite of winding down: with five members in the room for the first time, they make their most ambitious and coherent statement yet. The rules remain as strict as ever - no rehearsals, three days in the studio, everything tracked to a 1973 Teac 4‑track ¼” tape deck - but the music feels bigger, more finely sculpted, as if the group has finally learned every contour of its own constraints and decided to lean on them. The tape machine is not a nostalgia prop; it functions as a kind of sixth player, its limitations dictating form and its particular grain knitting together sounds that might otherwise fly apart.
The record splits along two interlocking approaches. On pieces like “Fish in the ashes” and “Tzuan”, the band commit to the discipline of no overdubs, five sets of hands building complete arrangements in real time. You can hear the decisions being made in the moment: how a marimba figure opens a pocket for tenor sax, how a flugelhorn line curls around a piano voicing, how a drum pattern is deliberately left airy so that tape loops and synths can shimmer on top without clutter. The music comes across as both intricate and breathable, the kind of ensemble playing where everyone has internalised the architecture enough to improvise within it without stepping on each other’s toes.
Elsewhere, notably on “Uxe” and “Go See the Place Where We Came From” - both springing from ideas by Yannis Panos - the group exploits the 4‑track more like a puzzle box. First they lay down a full five‑player rhythm section in stereo, effectively burning half their tape in one pass; then, with only two tracks left, they stack additional lines until the pieces blossom into ten‑part constructions that still retain the immediacy of live performance. “Uxe” sets the tone by opening with a gently rolling, McCoy Tyner‑esque piano vamp, almost austere in its simplicity, before the arrangement slowly flowers: drums and marimba interlock, horns fan out in wide intervals, synths and electric piano smear soft light across the harmonic field. The expansion in scope feels earned, more like a building taking on extra storeys than a studio trick.
Instrumentally, Volume 3 is the group’s richest tapestry yet. Drums, marimbas, synths, pianos, tenor, alto and soprano saxophone, flugelhorn, tape loops and electric piano all appear, but what matters is how they inhabit a shared aesthetic crossroads. The band is still mining the seam between vintage soundtracks, modal jazz and 1970s Italian library music, yet this time the gravitational pull of classical and early avant‑garde currents is stronger. “Mother‑Father” moves with a pulse that clearly nods to Steve Reich: maracas ticking like a clock, ostinato figures grinding against each other until the ear starts to pick out phantom patterns. The piece feels both hypnotic and slightly unstable, like a grid drawn by hand rather than machine.
“He Was Asked to Name Everything” reaches further back and further out, drawing on Gregorian chant contours, the “primitive tech” explorations of early Stockhausen and the bell‑like transparency of Arvo Pärt’s holy minimalism. Long tones stack into chords that are harmonically simple but loaded with overtones; tiny shifts in voicing or registration register as major emotional turns. Tape hiss and the faint wobble of the machine keep the music anchored in the physical world, preventing its spiritual aspirations from floating away into abstraction. Throughout the album, drones, dense clusters and lean jazz‑steeped progressions all seem to occupy the same liminal room, bound less by genre and more by a shared concern with timbre, repetition and the slow tilt of harmony.
