If you’ve followed the path of Breeders bassist Josephine Wiggs, you’ll have become accustomed to expecting surprises, and nothing about her latest album – recorded with longtime collaborator and Spacemen3 / Spiritualized mainstay Jon Mattock – has very much at all to do with anything else in her peripatetic back catalogue. If you don’t especially have the patience to read on, then these words will suffice: it is a collection of ten beautiful pieces, each one loaded with sparseness and understated drama.

Each piece here is led by either meditative piano or cello, augmented by a panoply of ever-so-subtle but incredibly expressive additions – scratchy little electronic impulses for which the lazy electronic music journalists’s favourite descriptor ‘glitchy’ is absurdly excessive; quiet bass motifs; guitar passages and non-rhythms that seem to have been cut and spliced in from something far larger.

Pieces like ‘The Weeping Of The Rain’, ’37 Words’ or ‘In A Yellow Wood’ could have been presented as fragile, almost folk-leaning acoustic ballads; instead, an acute capacity for adding fragmentary detail and gentle sound design makes these tracks far more engaging and open, washing them in ambient texture and providing a perfect soundtrack for nature’s omnipotence – and our individual, ephemeral legacies.

We Fall by Josephine Wiggs is out now on Sounds Of Sinners.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.