| Allmusic |
 This short album (a little under 30 minutes) documents a suite composed for Falling from Trees, a choreography by Adrienne Hart. Broderick recorded the music in early January 2009, three weeks before the premiere. He deliberately chose simple means of recording, camping out in a barn with upright piano, violin, viola, and computer. The music is typical Broderick: post-classical compositions with a post-rock feel, quiet and languid, with a touch of sorrow and the occasional ray of sunshine. He has used multi-tracking with the piano and strings to play depth-perception tricks, and it works marvelously well, especially in "Pill Induced Slumber," where the accrued piano rumbles amount to a gnarling drone that drowns out the violin's frantic sixteenth notes. Less accessible than his song-based albums (like 4 Track Songs, released almost simultaneously), Music for Falling from Trees is concise, focused, and well executed. A beautiful experiment, and a piece of incidental music that stands strong on its own....full text |
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| Pitchfork |
Still in his early twenties, Peter Broderick has the CV of a middle-aged journeyman. He's played a variety of stringed instruments for, like, every indie band in the Pacific Northwest. He moved to Copenhagen for a live stint with some mad Danes, Efterklang, and played on Library Tapes' A Summer Beneath the Trees. Amid all of this collaboration, he's eked out several of his own albums, ranging in style from post-classical (Float) to folk (Home). His catalog is consistently enjoyable and well-played, but we're still waiting for him to produce a major work. This isn't it, but it has a good excuse: Music For Falling From Trees is a score for a modern dance by Adrienne Hart, and standalone scores tend to be faintly anemic. It's like someone offering you half of a sandwich, then giving you just the bread. (There are some self-sufficient exceptions, like Jóhann Jóhannsson's Englabörn, which Music For Falling From Trees resembles.)
Broderick's score is surpassingly lovely, but it doesn't synthesize his influences into a unique voice-- "Patient Observation" is a dead-ringer for Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass, with a roundelay of longing strings conveying a lonely, enigmatic grandeur. "Electroconvulsive Shock", with its taut two-tone foundation, suggests the same affinity, and elsewhere, you'll hear unreconstructed echoes of Max Richter, Elodie Lauten, and many other composers of a post-minimal bent. Of course, trying on different voices is exactly what a musician Broderick's age should be doing. He wears them well, and will surely come into his own once he stops ticking items off of a to-do list and develops more focus. His development seems stunted only because of his prodigious output, which makes a brief career feel much longer than it is....full text |
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| Drownedinsound |
As his peers face the reality of seeking work in a world where gainful employment is hard to come by, 22-year-old Peter Broderick has written himself a CV which would render the most well-connected careers advisor redundant. It sparkles with an education gained recording with M. Ward and She & Him, work experience touring the world with Efterklang, and two much-lauded solo albums in 2008, the classically influenced ‘Float’ and the crafted folk of ‘Home’.
It is a CV which drew choreographer Adrienne Hart to approach Broderick at the end of last year to write a half-hour score for her contemporary dance performance Falling From Trees, which deals with the struggles of a patient trying to retain his identity within a psychiatric hospital. Broderick took just three weeks to compose his prescription, and while his previous recordings have demonstrated that he is a sickeningly talented multi-instrumentalist, for this piece he left aside the layered texture of Home and returned - at Hart’s suggestion - to the piano and strings of his earlier solo recordings. He states in the liner notes that he followed this request to the letter, so every sound here is produced by either piano, violin or viola, albeit often processed to create drone and distortion....full text |
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