Ray Lynch - Deep Breakfast (Windham Hill)

In the mid-Eighties, my Dad made it his audiophile mission to procure most of the Windham Hill catalog on the still nascent format of compact disc. George Winston’s December and Liz Story’s Solid Colors were staples of his collection, but Lynch’s Breakfast delivered something different and quickly rose to the top of his play list. Awash in carbonated keyboard pastels with the occasional presence of processed flute and viola, it blended pop classical leanings (Lynch was conservatory-trained on guitar and piano) with the kind of contemplative navel-gazing at the core of the label’s adult contemporary aesthetic. My parents’ study had a huge set of bay windows overlooking the Pacific and I remember spinning the album regularly at sunsets, the deep reds, oranges and blues of the dusk-darkened sky supplying a visual analog to Lynch’s color and texture saturated melodies. In true pseudo-philosophical fashion the song titles were borrowed from a then-unpublished tome by Sri Da Avabhasa, a leader of the Free Daist Communion, giving the music a heightened esoteric air. “Celestial Soda Pop” was the big radio hit. It and swirling “The Oh of Pleasure” reminded me most of my boyhood hero Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I could imagine corduroy sport-jacketed Sagan seated in his crystals-powered spaceship, sailing through the Magellanic cloud to the strains of the dancing synthetic strings. Sort of Pink Floyd lite filtered through a porous Vangelis sieve. Home for few days at the Old Pueblo outpost of Rancho de Taylor, I revisited the record, this time with the brilliant Southwestern sunsets against the Rincon Mountains as visual counterpart. My findings: the desert landscape works just as well as a northwest coastal one and Lynch’s music still stands up to my nostalgic recollection of it.