Dan Webb – “Things Rise and Fall” (feat. Logan Kane)

Dan Webb has spent the better part of two decades refining a restless hybrid of jazz, rock and electronic colour. Melbourne-born, now based in Singapore, the Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist builds records that feel less like collections of songs and more like weather systems. His 2023 album Sunshine/Dialogue earned him a nomination for Self-Producing Artist of the Year and confirmed a reputation for patient, detail-obsessed work. The new single arrives as the second taste of Lion Dance, his fifth album, due 13 November.

There is a particular quality of light that appears in the late afternoon when you are moving through a city that does not yet belong to you. The sun drops behind unfamiliar high-rises, reflections slide across wet asphalt, and every surface seems to hold two temperatures at once. Nothing is fixed. A scooter turns a corner and the whole scene rearranges itself. That quiet, continuous recalibration is the same sensation that lives inside “Things Rise and Fall.”

The track opens already in motion. Logan Kane’s bass sits low and rounded, locking against the kick with a density that feels physical rather than programmed. Clive Deamer’s drums keep the pocket alive through micro-timing rather than grid-perfect placement; the groove pulls forward because the players are listening to one another in real time. Nate Werth’s percussion adds further texture without ever cluttering the centre. Over this foundation Webb places a Hammond whose rotary motion saturates the midrange with warm, mechanical grain. The organ does not sit politely in the mix. It breathes, spins, and leaves a tactile residue that keeps the track from floating away into pure atmosphere.

Strings, arranged and performed by Stevie Blacke, open the stereo field wide. They move in longer arcs, giving the music an almost cinematic scale while the rhythm section stays firmly earthbound. The contrast is deliberate: the low end remains heavy and human, the high end becomes expansive and slightly unreal. The result is a wall of sound that never collapses into density for its own sake. Layers arrive, tension builds, space is withdrawn again. The structure avoids verse-chorus architecture entirely. It grows by accumulation and release, the same way the title itself suggests.

Listeners accustomed to tighter pop forms may initially find the piece restless. There is no single moment that announces itself as the drop or the chorus. Instead the energy rises and falls through the interplay of the musicians, through small harmonic turns, through the way the organ swells and the strings answer. That apparent restlessness is the point. The track is built to embody the idea it carries: things do not stay in one place. They gather, crest, and change shape.

Webb has drawn the piece from Taoist thought and from the disorientation of leaving Melbourne for Singapore. Those sources sit lightly. You do not need the philosophy to feel the motion. What you hear is an instrumental composition that treats groove as narrative and arrangement as landscape. It sits comfortably beside the more exploratory edges of contemporary fusion and the organic side of electronic production, the kind of music that rewards close listening and also works when played loud while the road ahead keeps changing elevation.

“Things Rise and Fall” is the sound of an artist who has stepped outside familiar ground and returned with a clearer sense of scale. The collaborators are high-calibre, yet the vision remains unmistakably Webb’s: curious, detailed, and unwilling to settle for a single temperature.

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Things Rise and Fall is out now.

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