“1300, Lewisham Way. I wonder if Asda sells kettles?”

– Leon Clowes, ‘Empirical Evidence Of The Existence Of Angels’

As a writer, it goes without saying that you have to be careful with how you use words. You don’t want to throw certain words around too often otherwise your writing starts to look sensationalist and hyperbolic.

For example, I’m acutely aware of how often I’ve described a piece of music that I’m writing about as ‘profound’. These are generally pieces of music that leave a deep, indelible mark on me in some way, that stir my emotions and move me in a specific but often unexpected way.

Multi-disciplinary artist Leon Clowes’ debut album, Empirical Evidence On The Existence Of Angels, is, however, a collection that fully deserves the word I am conscious I overuse.

It is unabashedly profound. Its centrepiece is the title track, wherein Clowes recounts the thoughts in his head every time he sees a feather during a specific period in 2021. Each entry is tagged, like a museum archive object or some fragment of bone unearthed in an archeological dig, with the date, time and location, followed by whatever thought was sluicing around his mind at that precise moment. On one level it is just a list of oblique diaristic entries – occasionally funny, often abstractly disconnected from their context, and yet overwhelmingly moving despite being positioned in a vacuum of quotidian nothingness.

Clowes’ goal was to prove, irrefutably, that angels existed. Not that London, where he lives, has a whole lot of pigeons that leave a lot of unwanted feathers on the pavement. It finds him attaching hope and significance during a period of personal turbulence, specifically his joining Alcoholics Anonymous. The pursuit of angels, and the self-reinforcing notion that a feather could have been discarded from an archangel’s wings, becomes something to focus on, something to distract himself from addiction; a salve, something hopeful, something concrete in an otherwise uncertain and unstable time.

I totally get it. Immediately after my father passed away in 2024, while in Los Angeles, I attached huge significance to any sighting of a humming bird or dragonfly, convinced that these creatures were messages from my absent father. It wasn’t without logic: a Google search told me what these were purported to mean, and thus I’ve believed it ever since, even after the oscillations of grief have slowly ebbed away. Others might see this as ridiculous, to which I’d say that the coping mechanisms we chose to adopt are intentionally personal, and therefore beyond logic.

‘Empirical Evidence Of The Existence Of Angels’ is surrounded by often short instrumental pieces, either for strings and piano or, in the case of the likes of ‘The Appliance Of Science’ and ‘Music Itself Listens To’, finely-wrought, wandering and fragmented electronics. Perhaps it’s the overhang of the title piece, but each of these vignettes carries that same sense of emotional uncertainty and the confrontation of demons. They are framed by the same muted, fragile and highly delicate sentiment, just without Clowes’ spoken-word focal point.

I could write more, but I won’t. I simply won’t do this body of work sufficient justice. I will instead return to where I started: this is profound.

https://naviarrecords.bandcamp.com/album/empirical-evidence-of-the-existence-of-angels

Empirical Evidence Of The Existence Of Angels was released July 23 2026 via Naviar Records.

Shameless plug: Leon recently processed a recording I made of me talking about my father, and how his absence contributed to the genesis of the Mortality Tables Impermanence Project. You can listen to ‘Absent Fathers’, which was first broadcast on ResonanceFM on July 14 2026, at Mixcloud here.

Words: Mat Smith

 (c) 2026 Further.