The Dark Jazz Project – 3 / Dead King (A Play In Three Acts)

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“Don’t overdose on this stuff,” The Dark Jazz Project’s Andrew Spackman told me when he sent me his new album, 3. “It’s pretty potent!”

I reckon I can handle it. I’ve been consuming Spackman’s music for years, first when he was know as SAD MAN and more recently as The Dark Jazz Project. Wonky jazz bangers were always Spackman’s medicine of choice, but with his most recent reinvention, it’s like he’s taken his music into a whole new dimension. I don’t mean into some sort of spiralling, ‘groovy, baby’ timewarp. I mean darker. Jazzier. Projectier.

3 is intense, though, even by Spackman’s standards. The risk advisory is to be noted. Twenty tracks. Two hours. An accompanying play called Dead King (A Play In Three Acts). This sort of stuff would take most artists years to come up with, but Spackman is able to deliver this kind of wonderful sprawl with a spontaneity and fluidity – at high speed – that’s resolutely fresh and refreshingly imaginative.

Never one to repeat himself, 3 flips and flops like around like manic three-legged frog, delving deep into dance music’s murkiest corners to drag out skewed rhythms, off-kilter half-melodies, headcleaning glitchy noise and a seemingly limitless collection of cool jazz samples. And that’s just the first track, the decisively-named ‘Jazz’. The effect here is like watching an especially dexterous DJ seeking out the most floor-clearing tracks in his collection and yet managing to get the stoic crowd to wiggle along with manic glee.

Picking out standout tracks from 3’s vast number of cuts is a tough, nay impossible task. They’re all belters. If highlights you must have, check out ‘The Great Ones’, a track which lurches from graceful, contemplative piano to a segment that sounds like Moby’s ‘Thousand’ remixed by a Dutch hardcore artist while juggling cans of ball bearings. Meanwhile, ‘Carloza’ twitches forth on a breakbeat reimagined by Gene Krupa, over which Spackman sprinkles tinkly synths and buzzing, vital hooks.

‘Babonza’ sounds like a shoot-out between Star Wars laser pistols and a drinking straw noisily chasing the final drops in a plastic beaker containing Ken Kesey’s Kool-Aid. ‘The Stranger Again’ is a tight, 4/4 monster that rapidly switches direction into a noisy mess, just as you’ve started showing off your best moves. It rather reminds me of when I was dancing to the Paul Oakenfold remix of U2’s ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing’ at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Wildmoor nightclub and the DJ switched tracks just as I had started playing air guitar along with The Edge.

3 is effectively the informal soundtrack to Dead King, involving a medieval monarch, a timewarp (okay, so I was wrong about the timewarp: groovy, baby) and a magical, energy-providing creature. The play is beautifully presented, with fantastic photography and a totally bonkers narrative. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for the King, though the title may have already yielded that clue.

Mr. Spackman, you have outdone yourself this time.

Footnote: this review was completed while flying over Canada. As ever, I had eschewed the onboard entertainment in favour of the moving map. Two places were beneath us as I concluded the final sentence – Flin Flon and Pukatawagan – while Medicine Hat was off in distance. I fear that my mind had reached such befuddlement by Spackman’s latest collection that place names and track titles had become indistinguishable. Sheesh, he wasn’t wrong about the potency.

Shameless plug: Spackman contributed to my Mortality Tables LIFEFILES series with a track that was literally made with nothing but clothes hangers. Check it out here. All proceeds to the Deaf Children’s Society and Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

3 and Dead King were released / published by Irregular Patterns on July 7 2023.

(c) 2023 Further.

Amongst The Pigeons – Embrace The Point Of No Return

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Embrace The Point Of No Return by Daniel Parson’s Amongst The Pigeons project couldn’t be more different from his 2021 album Silence Will Be Assumed As Acceptance. For a start, this is a solo flight for Parsons, whereas Silence Will Be Assumed… was very much a collaborative release. It’s also instrumental, eschewing the vocal contributions that have characterised his last few releases. And yet, in spite of these differences, Embrace The Point Of No Return feels like a strangely logical follow-up.

Celebratory and upbeat, tracks like ‘Swipe For Latex’, ‘Trespass’, ‘Proximity Alert’ and ‘Who Do You Have To Go Home For’ have a compelling urgency and intensity – solid beats, dominant synth hooks and a propulsive, irresistible forward motion. That sense of intensity was also evident on Silence Will Be Assumed… with its focus on environmental disaster, social inequality and racism, but here it’s as if Parsons has accepted that the world is totally fucked, so we might as well just give up and dance. With that in mind, these pieces all shimmer and twitch with a euphoric, hedonistic carefreeness, devoid of any existential worries or troubles.

‘Nightshade’ is this writer’s personal favourite, a delicate, low-key banger that transports me back to early 1990s dance music. That track seems to encapsulate a sense of levity and optimism. I may be conflating this with my own now-distant youthfulness at the start of that decade, but it really felt like you could lose yourself completely in dance music’s rhythms and melodies and ignore what was going on in the world and the rest of your life.

This is the joyous, positive, life-affirming DJ set that plays while we watch our final sunset. We are dancing on the terminal beach, our eyes fixed on the diminishing horizon, outside the last nightclub on Earth.

Embrace The Point Of No Return by Amongst The Pigeons is released August 4 2023 by Peace & Feathers.

(c) 2023 Further.

Jono Wright – Special Measures

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JONO WRIGHT – ‘SPECIAL MEASURES’

Debut album released digitally worldwide 31 July 2023

Special Measures is the debut album from guitarist JONO WRIGHT.

Wright might hail from the Midlands in the UK, but the heart and soul of Special Measures lies some 4000 miles away in Nashville, Tennessee. Named after Wright’s experiences in the education sector, the album was inspired by the fingerstyle playing of Chet Atkins. Special Measures features ten instrumental tracks of dexterous playing and beatific melodies, all surrounded by moments of contemplative introspection and joyous levity.

Recorded with George Shilling (Bernard Butler, Billy Bragg, Steve Winwood, Primal Scream), ‘Special Measures’ follows Wright’s debut EP, 6 (2018). Between 6 and beginning to write the pieces that form Special Measures, Wright began an intense process of learning the complex and dexterous fingerstyle technique with guidance and encouragement from fellow guitarist Gareth Pearson.

“Growing up, my dad was always obsessed with this type of music,” says Wright. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to learn to do how what those guitarists were doing. The idea of playing more than one thing on the guitar at once made no sense to me. So I’d always been into it, but just couldn’t figure out how to do it, or where to start.”

The album opens with ‘Rubecula’ and ‘Shiver’, two becalming, meditative pieces that started from the same experience. “Rubecula’ is the Latin name for the robin,” explains Wright. “I’d had a conversation with somebody from work whose dad had recently died. She said that if a robin is near you, it represents a person who has passed away. When we were in Canada one Summer, we went to stay with one of my aunties. Her father, my great uncle, had passed away a few years before, and this was the first time I’d visited since he’d died. He was like a grandad to me. We were talking in her kitchen, and behind her on the shelf was a jug with a robin on it. It just hit me. The feeling that I got after seeing that robin was like a shiver, like a chill. That’s why those two tracks fit into one another.”

Elsewhere, the gentle, wistful ‘146’ was prompted by TV footage of Captain Sir Tom Moore’s lockdown walks for charity, something that made him a magnet for anyone looking for reasons to be cheerful during the challenging, bleak days of the 2020 pandemic. “146 was the last regiment he was in,” explains Wright. “I could have made a big thing of naming it after him, but I thought this was a little nod of the cap instead.”

One of the album’s highlights is ‘Ziggy’s Bounce’, a carefree, lighthearted track named after Wright’s golden retriever. “I take him for walks every day, and he hears all of my problems – my deepest, darkest thoughts and secrets,” he confesses. “This piece is him all over. He’s playful and stupid and everything in between.” A similarly jubilant freespiritedness occupies the brief ‘Jenny Wren’, a tender piece written about Wright’s mother.

Although the album is primarily Wright solo, there are moments where his captivating guitar is joined by other instruments. These interventions are always sensitively employed, and never intrusive. George Shilling’s stirring, emotional cello can be heard on pieces like ‘End Of The Road’ and ‘Last Train’, while Wright and Gareth Pearson together offer a dizzying display of fingerstyle technique on the lyrical, carefree ‘Gone Fishing’.

The album concludes with ‘Sweet Dreams’, which Wright describes as the lullaby to his children that he wrote far too late. Sweet, loving, hopeful and full of life, it acts as the perfect emotive counterweight to the themes of mortality and acceptance that cling to the opening moments of this very special and moving album.

Special Measures track listing

Rubecula
Shiver
Ziggy’s Bounce
146
Jenny Wren
Last Train
Special Measures
Gone Fishing
End Of The Road
Sweet Dreams

All tracks written and performed by Jono Wright. Produced by Jono Wright and George Shilling.

Cello on ‘Rubecula’, ‘Shiver’, ‘Last Train’ and ‘End Of The Road’ by George Shilling. Additional guitar on ‘Gone Fishing’ by Gareth Pearson.

Recorded at Manor Gardens Studio, Newton Abbot.

Artwork by Andi Chamberlain.

Special Measures is released digitally worldwide on 31 July 2023.

BIOGRAPHY

Jono Wright is a guitarist and songwriter from Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom. He released his debut EP, 6, in 2018.

In addition to being a guitarist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of styles and artists, Wright is also a massive Star Wars fan, an obsession which lead him to name his band Mos Eisley Bros.

Wright’s debut solo album, Special Measures, is released 31 July 2023.

(c) 2023 Jono Wright. Press release by Mat Smith

JaM Session V – July 21 2023

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In a break with tradition, Jon and I decided to accompany our vinyl listening evening with a takeaway curry instead of our usual pan-cultural snack assortment. Fine Indian cuisine was provided by The Woburn Fort in Woburn Sands and we ducked in to The Gapevine for a drink while they prepared the food.

We left The Grapevine as a crooner picked up a microphone and began, er, serenading the customers. Any temptation to hang around and listen to him presumably belting out big band hits by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett (may he rest in peace) over a tinny karaoke backing track was swiftly overridden – after all, there was serious LP listening business to attend to.

The evening’s listening began with The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars (RCA, 1972) by Davie Bowie. Little else needs saying about this album, so instead of analysing its myriad highlights, I told Jon the story of how my former boss Antony once had a private dinner with Bowie at Montreux.

Next up was Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield (Virgin, 1973). This LP used to belong to my mum, who bought this when she moved from Scotland to Stratford-upon-Avon, not long before she met my dad in the pub she worked at. I only have affection for Tubular Bells, and I was absolutely obsessed with this LP as a small child. I used to pull all my parents’ albums out of the rack where they stored and pore over them for ages. This was one I studied intently, hoping that one day the mystery of what exactly a ‘nasal choir’ was would solve itself.

The evening being somewhat curtailed by me needing to go and pick up my eldest daughter from work, we managed one more LP before I left – The Shadows’ 20 Golden Greats (EMI, 1977). This LP used to belong to my dad, and was another sleeve I absolutely loved. Playing the album was accompanied by Jon attempting to copy The Shadows’ dance moves, and concluded with us deciding that while they had some pretty brilliant tunes (‘Foot Tapper’ was called out specifically), twenty of them played back-to-back was a little much. A bit like overeating Indian takeaway, maybe…

Our conversation included a brief discussion of Taylor Swift and the Speak Now snafu involving an album including tracks by Cabaret Voltaire and Matthew Herbert finding their way into certain sleeves of Ms Swift’s latest re-recorded release. The night before, coincidentally, I’d spoken to Mal from the Cabs. This may be apocryphal, but Mal had heard that this was a deliberate act of sabotage by disgruntled pressing plant staff annoyed at a statistic that four out of five vinyl albums are bought by people without record players. I find this specific statistic amusing, because four out of five references to music in a typical conversation are about Taylor Swift*.

We also spoke of the sad death of postal orders, Jon’s appearance on Pebble Mill, pre-Amazon mail order shopping, fishing, Milton Keynes’ new four bin household waste solution, and domestic chores.

The highlight of the evening was a duet between Jon playing a harmonica and his faithful canine sidekick Chester howling along in time like a tortured blues singer. Recorded evidence will follow after our sixth JaM Session.

* This statistic may not be accurate, but it certainly appears to be correct based on my own recent monocultural household experiences.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

drøne – The Long Song

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drøne is a duo of Mark Van Hoen and Touch’s Mike Harding, accompanied by ‘invited guests’. Presented as a single piece divided into discrete sonic movements, The Long Song captures the pair exploring a soundworld characterised by tiny, almost imperceptible changes in currents.

On ‘Escapement’, snatches of overheard conversation and baritone prayer calls join hissing noises that sound like gas escaping from a damaged canister, what could be a faltering shortwave data broadcast and tiny clusters of electronic melody. The interplay between these disparate elements is sudden and fleeting. Nothing stays in place for long. Everything – literally everything you hear – is ephemeral and inconsequential.

The approach taken on ‘Escapement’ runs through the entire duration of The Long Song. On ‘Altamura’, sounds arrange themselves into an inchoate, distant rhythm, but just as you start to lock into its abstract groove, it drops away and is replaced by a grainy – possibly VHS – recording of a weather broadcast from a location that isn’t specific. The effect is like listening at twin speeds: a sense of things unfolding both slowly and also rapidly. This isn’t some intense trading of ideas designed to appeal to the hyperactivity of the modern age, as the pace is rarely ever frantic; yet somehow ideas are allowed to evolve here at a surprising velocity, just one that is delivered with the extremest subtlety.

‘Inanna’ is one of the most gripping and arresting pieces on the album. Here, a collection of haunting, overlapping choral vocals (from Bana Haffar, Jana Winderen, Anna von Hausswolff and others) floats delicately and elegiacally into view. The presentation is at once uplifting, joyous and vital, yet they float above a foundation layer of gravelly, impenetrable sub-bass and clusters of wild static. As soon as your attention locks onto that, any sense of joy immediately evaporates, leaving you suddenly doubtful and uncertain. Something similar happens on ‘He Frightened The Bird Away’ which follows, only here it is a vaguely sinister, alien tapping sound and restless non-rhythm that punctures its way through clouds of becalming, descending harmonies.

There are countless moments like this across ‘The Long Song’, moments that trip you up and force you to reconsider what it is that you thought you might have heard, that decontextualise and recontextualise themselves endlessly. It shows two artists in complete control of their sound palettes, fully aware of the powerfully disorienting impact their assemblages can have on a listener.

The Long Song by drøne was released 5 May 2023.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

JaM Session IV – June 24 2023

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The JaM Sessions find my friend Jon and I listening to vinyl, eating snacks, drinking wine / beer, reminiscing about life growing up in the Midlands and contemplating the major issues du jour.

At our May meeting, we found ourselves talking about Jim Reeves’ Distant Drums (RCA Victor, 1966). While flicking through LPs to take to Jon’s, I came upon a copy of this on my desk and couldn’t fathom where it had come from. Finally, I realised that it had been one of two old LPs that had been used to pad out a copy of a Disney themes album that my eldest daughter had bought. That became the first album we listened to this time around. The album was produced by Chet Atkins, and the shiny LP sleeve smelled of charity shops. ‘Distant Drums’ is a brilliant song, incidentally.

Next up was The Real Glenn Miller Orchestra’s Play The Original Music Of The Film ‘The Glenn Miller Story’ (RCA International reissue, 1971). I watched The Glenn Miller Story recently and have had some of Miller’s big band melodies swirling around my head ever since, so it was a useful way of scratching that itch. Both of us wondered whereabouts in America Kalamazoo is, but neither of us were ‘In The Mood’ to Google it.

Jon and I became mindful at this point that we should probably bring things up to date a little more before we ended up succumbing to an entire of easy listening. For both of us, ‘up to date’ is shorthand for the 1980s. Jon suggested The Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It (Go-Feet, 1980). This found its way onto Jon’s turntable after a conversation about my youngest daughter going to see The Beat and Bow Wow Wow at The Roadmender in Northampton earlier in the week. Neither Jon nor I have seen either band; my 15 year old daughter has.

Staying resolutely in the 1980s, we concluded the evening with a spin of a very crackly copy of Thompson Twins’ Quick Step & Side Kick (Arista, 1983), which I’d bought from the Oxfam in Aylesbury recently. We spent most of the time pondering precisely what it was that recording at Compass Point – as the Twins did for this album – brought to the sessions.

In a departure from our previous focus on snacks that can be dipped into various flavours of houmous, Jon rustled up two very fine vegan salads. Major topics of discussion included his son’s diary entry about eating sushi for the first time, coups, the breakdown of Keynesian economic theory and Les Patterson’s fabled appearance on Parkinson sat next to a cringing Martine McCutcheon.

(c) 2023 Further.

Amy Cutler – Sister Time

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“For the full intended listening experience please use a cheap pair of headphones in the backseat of a car, bus, or in your bedroom,” advises the press release for Amy Cutler’s Sister Time. That instruction immediately transports you to a time and place before iPhones, Bluetooth earphones and all the comfortable trappings of modernity. For me, it takes me to the back of my parents’ car, listening to Kylie Minogue’s first album on a crappy Sanyo cassette player with uncomfortable orange foam stretched over the earpieces, only to find the batteries were running out and I hadn’t thought to bring spares.

Cutler’s cassette for Strategic Tape Reserve is a metaphorical duet between two of her selves, namely the person she is today and the person she was at the start of the 1990s. The source material for the 24 pieces here were mixtapes and other recordings made on a hi-fi she bought with the winnings from a drawing competition she entered as a child. This conversation between her youthful aspirations and her current sensibilities produces a collection which is both fragile, moving and also strangely unsettling.

The best example of that intended queasy feeling comes on ‘Sleeper Train To Nowhere’, featuring a looped and manipulated section of Coil’s brittle, emphatic ‘Cold Cell’ submerged under gauzy textures, unspooling sounds and heavily altered voices that sound like the ceaseless chattering of an uncertain mind. The album is interspersed with pieces like ‘It Is Only A Dream Of The Grass Blowing’ and ‘Lost Field, Empty Reins’ that have a mournful, choral dimension, full of fleeting, floating voices and untraceable field recordings, like tiny eulogies for lost and irreplaceable time. This is the domain of small loops, minor gestures, distressed fragments and obscured views.

These pieces, for me, are analogous to the concept of fading memories. There is something powerfully resonant in taking a preserved artefact, with all its attached recollections, hopes, dreams, innocence and associations, and trying to see (or hear) that world again from the vantage point of your changed self. Thought-provoking, uneasy listening from the mind(s) of Amy Cutler.

Sister Time by Amy Cutler was released 26 May 2023 by Strategic Tape Reserve

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Rupert Lally – Multitudes

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In a message to me accompanying a link to his new album, Switzerland-based electronic musician Rupert Lally cautioned that the collection was “VERY ambient.”

That sort of risk warning isn’t a problem for me. I’ve been listening to ambient music intently since the mid-1990s. I’ve always found it one of the most underrated, engaging genres of electronic music, and have always resisted the notion of it simply being sonic wallpaper. Neither is this unfamiliar territory for Lally, whose back catalogue is full of releases that offer the sort of weightless ephemerality that Multitudes floats upon.

The tools of Lally’s trade might be modular synths, but, for the most part, the tracks on Multitudes are informed by naturalistic sensibilities, with pieces named after wildernesses, rivers, beaches, woodlands and naturally-occurring phenomenon. Unlike the actual places that inspired Lally’s recent pastoral excursions through his local area (Wanderweg), these locations and events are entirely metaphorical, but they nonetheless highlight an artist completely at one with the natural world.

Lally is masterful composer of evocative melodies, and that’s evident here in spite of the tracks being constructed primarily from textural materials. One of the stand-out pieces, ‘Fjords’, might be presented under a drapery of intense reverb, but its core signifier is a sweeping, long-form melody that suggests an almost classical grandeur. The title track has a searching central refrain with a clean Fender Rhodes jazziness, held in place by the faintest trace of a rhythm. Elsewhere, the brief ‘Wasteland’ carries a sense of mournfulness and regret as it alights its attention upon an environment ravaged by the opposite of Lally’s respect for the natural world.

VERY ambient it maybe, but VERY good it also is. A beautiful, engaging, subtle and moving addition to Lally’s expansive catalogue.

Multitudes by Rupert Lally is released June 2 2023. rupertlally.bandcamp.com

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Secret Flight – Secret Flight

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Secret Flight first floated ethereally past my music radar at a performance at Milton Keynes Gallery in January 2020. Built from wonderfully delicate synth sounds, heat-haze hooks and brittle rhythms, overlaid with hypnotic, angelic vocals, that Secret Flight performance occupied a unique zone bordering lo-fi electronica, classical melodies and a sort of shoegazer-y feeling of numbness and detachment.

This self-titled album follows an initial release in 2018, My Forever Mirage. Secret Flight contains some truly mesmerising, haunting pieces, each constructed using that fragile, sparse approach to arrangements that left such an indelible impression on me back in 2020. Along with more resolutely ephemeral pieces comprising just voice and elegiac synth chords, there are some truly breathtaking standout moments. One of these is the seven-minute ‘A Prism’, laden with detuned beats, subtle arpeggios, a relentless spiral of synth tones and a chamber choir coda about grief that offers a sense of resolution and closure.

Another outstanding track is ‘On The Day’, which has a beautiful, 1981-vintage synth-pop outlook, the combination of precise, restrained electronics and soaring, beguiling voice recalling Yazoo’s finest moments. ‘Vertigo’ has a crunchy beat with a vaguely glam rock swing, the accompanying vocal having a sort of muted euphoria that reminds me of early Smiths, while the quietly defiant progressions of closing track ‘To Lose’ is going to be the music accompanying the final scene in the movie adaptation of the book I haven’t written yet.

Secret Flight is a remarkable, if consciously understated album. It maintains a firm hold on your attention, enveloping you with its delicate presentation and revealing more of itself and its sentiment the more time you spend with it. Its vocal themes are open and honest, yet also shrouded and deliberately obfuscated, offering a window into emotional turmoil, love, loss and personal anxieties. A powerful (yet subtle) journey from start to finish.

Secret Flight by Secret Flight is released May 26 2023.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Gvantsa Narim – Apotheosis Animæ

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Gvantsa Narimanidze is a sound artist from Tbilisi, Georgia. Her latest work was inspired by the winter season and was composed between the end of 2022 and start of 2023. It was a winter fraught with anxiety given the ongoing Russia – Ukraine conflict and fears that gas supplies across Europe would be insufficient to cope with extremes of cold weather, ushering in nightmarish predictions that countless people, suffering fuel poverty, would freeze to death.

How much of that backdrop fed into Apotheosis Animæ is hard to discern. What is evident is a frosty stillness that presides over the delicate, sparse pieces that Narimanidze presents here. The piano-led opening track ‘Apotheosis’ is augmented by gentle reverb which only enhances a mournful, slightly dejected tone. It’s almost as if Narimanidze is sighing outwardly at the start of colder weather and the unstoppable slipping by of time.

That air of austerity and acceptance wends its way with intense subtlety through the pieces here. The ten-minute ‘Amnesia’ begins like an outline of itself, wherein all detail has been scrubbed away and replaced by tiny, almost imperceptible changes in momentum, a growling synth tone and high-pitched string sound drifting in like a bitter breeze. Snatches of voice, eulogising humankind’s relationship to the Earth, taps into Narimanidze’s belief system, foreshadowing a dramatic denouement wherein all the disparate elements previously buried deep in the mix coalesce into something tangible, something living.

‘Born In The Mist’ consists of suppressed, howling sounds that carry a sense of danger, heavy processing giving rise to a murky, dramatic, almost claustrophobic soundworld. It reminds me (pleasantly) of the first time I came upon one of Thomas Köner’s quiet works, whereupon I turned the volume up to an ear-splitting level to experience the brutality of amplified near-silence. ‘Train’ is easily one of the most mesmerising pieces in this collection, beginning with icicle-sharp pirouettes and gradually opening out into a crystalline field of synth pads on the axis between the haunting and the joyous. Elsewhere, the expansive ‘Codex’ has a lingering latency, an unswerving drone loop dominating the background while tendril-like synth arpeggios creep slowly into earshot. A stately, muffled glissandi piano motif adds a sense of grandeur as it weaves through the drone and synth spirals.

Narimanidze is a masterful sound designer, capable of infusing her pieces with a naturalistic spirit but also a searching, inquisitive, unresolved quality. Those signature flourishes can be found all over Apotheosis Animæ, representing a fantastically intricate, complex and yet spiritually rewarding body of work.

Apotheosis Animæ by Gvatsa Narim is released on 26 May 2023 by Cruel Nature.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.