Category: Album reviews

Evelyn Glennie & Roly Porter – One Day Band 17

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Trestle Records’ One Day Band series unites musicians for special one-off recordings, consistently resulting in collaborations full of wonder and surprise. For the 17th album in the series, electronic musician Roly Porter (Vex’d) was put to work alongside esteemed percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.

This is a session where Glennie’s technique is often more felt than heard thanks to Porter’s intense processing. The exception is ‘Part 3’, which starts with some atmospheric rhythms and drum sounds while Porter seems to be respectfully biding his time for the right moment to interact with these rich and varied sounds. It’s not until the second half that he emerges from the shadows, whereupon his interventions crash upon one another, leading to a deafening and vital conclusion of rapturous and thrilling feedback.

The track exists in direct contrast to the album’s first piece, which is full of gnarly drama, tense drones and abrupt crashes derived from Glennie’s timpani but converted via Porter’s kit into shards of punishing electronic weaponry. The album’s final piece is where everything locks together uniformly, a challenging yet transcendent epic presented as an impenetrable wall of sound, through which you can just make out Glennie’s intricate patterns and Porter’s electronic flourishes.

One Day Band 17 by Evelyn Glennie and Roly Porter is out now on Trestle Records.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2019 Further.

Bayonne – Drastic Measures

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Echo can be a troublesome thing.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a track on Austin-based Roger Sellers’ second Bayonne album that isn’t drenched in shimmering reverb. The ten tracks here are all complex, painstakingly-wrought, many-layered affairs achieved in a manner not dissimilar to the way Brian Wilson developed the distinctive sound of Pet Sounds; but the final layer throughout is an impenetrable fog of echo, and the effect is to give even the most upbeat moments here – the mesmerising piano-led ‘Uncertainty Deranged’ or the densely percussive title track – an uncertain, awkward, unfathomable quality.

Sellers wrote the album in a relatively dissociative frame of mind amid the relentless gigging that accompanied his debut; a feeling of arriving but never staying. That gives Drastic Measures a dynamic of constantly moving, never once still, even its most tranquil moments containing a propulsive restlessness.

From the tender, resigned balladry of the haunting ‘Bothering’ to the insistent drama of ‘I Know’, Drastic Measures is an album that can’t help but leave an indelible mark on you – you just won’t be able to tell if you feel better or more confused about yourself when it’s all over.

You can thank that pesky echo for that.

Drastic Measures is released by City Slang on February 22 2019.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.

Hugh Marsh – Violinvocations

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Hugh Marsh - Violinvocations - Artwork

Violinvocations by violinist Hugh Marsh was recorded at the Los Angeles home of Jon Hassell and owes its entire genesis to enormously frustrating circumstances: schlepping all the way to LA from Toronto to work on a project, only to find that it had been scrapped without anyone bothering to tell him. Frustrating though it was, it afforded the time that Marsh used to craft this innovative, colourful collection using only his violin and a cabinet full of effects.

Marsh is an adaptable player, and that versatility is evident across the eight diverse pieces here. What isn’t immediately evident is his chosen instrument, given how subsumed it is under layers of processing and looping. You hear plucked notes and melodies underpinning the likes of ‘Thirtysix Hundred Grandview’ or the scratchy, plaintive soundscapes of ‘The Rain Gambler’ but on other moments – such as the crazy ‘Miku Murmuration’, wherein Marsh’s violin is converted into babbling Hatsune Miku gibberish or the Hendrix-y riffery of ‘A Beautiful Mistake’ – you’d be hard pressed to believe a violin was ever involved.

The effect is to do for the violin what Robert Fripp did for the guitar, turning your perception of this humble instrument entirely on its head.

Violinvocations by Hugh Marsh will be released by Western Vinyl on February 15 2019.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.

Lucy Mason – Flashback Romance

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Think of Flashback Romance as hotly-tipped singer Lucy Mason concluding some unfinished business: four of the nine tracks on Mason’s debut LP appeared last year, including her fragile re-rendering of Radiohead’s ‘High And Dry’ and the sparse, dreamy, glacial build of ‘Out Of The Blue’ that achingly opens the record.

Produced with Jess Ellen, Mason might have perfect pop poise – a voice that could melt the heart of even the stoniest disposition and songs that nod to both soulful quarters and the casually anthemic – but her conceit is to wrap emotional outpourings like the mournful ‘3am’ in delicate arrangements enriched by vintage analogue synth warmth, hazy reverb and atypical rhythms.

‘Sunday’ is a profound highlight at the album’s centre. Here, Mason’s voice carries a flat, regretful quality draped with echoing piano and a barely-there architecture of beats that opens out unexpectedly into a buzzing electronic pop conclusion blessed by an irrepressible, muted rapture. The album concludes with ‘Kids That Night’, the curious highlight of the tracks that appeared last year. The song is beautifully, cruelly, affecting, offering a wistful view back into carefree days of innocence before life got in the way and heaped unwanted responsibilities on your callow shoulders.

Flashback Romance by Lucy Mason is self-released on February 15 2019.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.

Neu Gestalt – Controlled Substances

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Neu Gestalt is the alias of Edinburgh-based electronic musician Les Scott, whose fourth album Controlled Substances was created using a deliberately pared-back set of tools: a violin, a guitar, a modular system for processing source material, Akai samplers and an Atari computer from the late 80s to bring it all together.

The result is twelve tracks of extreme fragility, each and every sound within them processed and sculpted into their final form, and only occasionally betraying their original sources. On the standout ‘Kintsugi’, echoing temple percussion and glitchy rhythms provide a basis for heavily processed guitar patterns and frozen half-melodies, while on opening track ‘Machines Of Grace’ plaintive violins emerge as crackly, embrittled textures over a bass-heavy electronic dub rhythm slowed down to a glacial pace.

Scott is a fan of the way that timestretched samples have an inherently degraded quality, and you can hear that play out across the material here, providing an evocative fabric through which more clarified sounds are permitted to wend their way. The effect, on tracks like the mesmerising ‘A Glow From The Wreckage’ or ‘Drowned Worlds’, is like trying, and ultimately failing, to precisely alight upon memories from the gauzy mists of your past.

Controlled Substances will be released by Alex Tronic Records on February 8 2019.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.

TOTM – Bliss / Blurred

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cover

The debut album from Brussels-based fourpiece TOTM cuts a distinctive path through dreamy folk, the rhythmic fluidity of Krautrock, percussive minimalism and hypnotic electronics. In vocalist and guitarist Charles Bernard they have a frontman that pours quiet emotion into each of the tracks on Bliss / Blurred, poised on a tension-filled wire between anguished musings and beguiling wonder, that voice being perfectly placed amid Nicolas Magrez’s intricate synth layers, Adrien Kaempf’s bass figures and Thomas Vaccargiu’s complex drumming.

Bliss / Blurred opens with the rapidly-evolving synth cycles and expanding sound palette of ‘Silver Apples’, becoming by turns serene and angular, finally opening out into a mass of restrained drumming and fuzzy riffs. The track sets the scene for the album’s frequent switches in direction, from ‘Stellar Door’s tight, proggy spacefunk to the dreamy ‘Ghost Dance’ with its attendant rapidly arpeggiating synth patterns.

The album closes with the droning interplay of ‘The Sleeper’, anchored in motion by a steady bass pulse and some of Bernard’s most affecting vocals. Like a lot of the tracks here, ‘The Sleeper’ is far from docile, coalescing via dexterous drumming toward a noisy, clangorous conclusion, marking Bliss / Blurred as a powerful, resonating body of work.

Bliss / Blurred is released by Flickering Lights on February 1st.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.

The Silver Field – Rooms

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The central figure in The Silver Field is Coral Rose, whose debut album for Tim Burgess’s O Genesis imprint concerns itself with the metaphorical act of leaving a home, and the metaphorical rooms of that home that begat the album’s title.

Composed of off-kilter tape loops and an anything-goes approach to sound layering – everything from strings to the queasy drones of a bagpipe chanter – Rooms is a captivating progression through an ethereal landscape lying somewhere between organic, mystical folk and an electronically-enhanced post-modern ambience thanks to heavy processing and the deployment of a breath-controlled analogue synth. The effect on tracks like ‘Gost’ is to draw you into a dense, undulating web of sonic events – clattering sounds and percussive micro-noises, a gently repeating guitar, low vocals and patches of jarring discordance.

The instrumental lamentation of ‘Rosebud’, a pairing of acoustic guitar and unpredictable, noisy interventions sounding not unlike a distorted, reverb-drenched recording of a bow being dragged across a metal bench, is nothing short of an heartbreaking, arresting moment among arresting, heartbreaking moments. It is on ‘Nourish’ when the album’s electronic dimension presents itself most clearly, with a spiralling, eddying array of echoing crystalline sequences rapidly circling a mournful, affecting vocal.

Rooms is out now on O Genesis.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.

Kaada – ZombieLars (Soundtrack)

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John Erik Kaada’s Closing Statements was one of last year’s standout albums, straddling as it did the worlds of electronic music and modern classical composition with a moving suite of pieces dealing with final farewells. A versatile composer for his own solo releases as well as film and TV, Norway’s Kaada is also a frequent collaborator with Faith No More guitarist and Ipecac label head Mike Patton, making him a highly adaptable and fluid musician with a penchant for unexpected eclecticism.

This new release contains some of Kaada’s work for the TV series ZombieLars, a coming-of-age teen story filtered through the voguish lens of vampires, werewolves and zombies. The collection showcases Kaada’s precise rendering of mood and texture via styles that feel inextricably linked to an 1980s soundtrack recipe. ‘Algebra and ‘Annerledes’s synth sprinkles and dominant beats sound like they may have consciously mainlined the score from Escape From New York, while the stentorian ‘Beeserk’ has a stop-start quality akin to a classically-infused flavour of dubstep. The urgent, moody ‘Detroit’ stands out for its unswervingly hypnotic layers of bass and haunting melodies, while ‘Brain’ captures some of the maudlin quality that dominated Closing Statements with stirring strings and gentle arpeggios.

ZombieLars is released by Mirakel Recordings on January 25 2019.

Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2019 Further.