Nicholas Langley outlines his latest offering with the explanation that “One Square Centimetre Of Light is a continuation of the ideas and techniques I used to compose Thinky Space and especially Cymru Cynhyrchiol. Recorded in spring and summer 2024, this album was an outlet for a lot of thoughts and emotions regarding the involuntary loss of time and memory.’
There are gaps in the narrative here – gaps which I don’t feel it’s necessarily appropriate to probe or plug, particularly when, in his extensive explanation of the album’s final, thirteen-minute piece, ‘Missing Day’ – of which he writes: “‘Missing Day’ can refer either to the mourning feeling of losing whole days to bad health, or to the actual calendar day of mourning, Missing Day, on February 20th. For this piece, as well as layers of tracks 3, 4 and 5, I returned to the generative music techniques I started in 2016. This time around I spent many days getting to grips with programming multiple pieces until I eventually programmed a piece which exactly conveyed my feelings of mourning and hope.”
Memory loss can be a source of panic, anxiety, and while it appears to be a focus, or inspiration of sorts for this album, it feels inappropriate to probe here. But listening to the soft, soporific ambience of One Square Centimetre Of Light, I find myself wondering – where will it go next?
It doesn’t really need to ‘go’ anywhere: the instrumental works which make this album are subtle, sublime. ‘Welsh Summits’ is a beautiful, resonant ambient exploration, while ‘The Weather on the Seafronts’ is magical, mystical, ambient, while ‘Old Age’ quivers and chimes abstractedly, with layers of resonance and depth.
And so we arrive at ‘Missing Day’: fully forty minuses of melodic instrumental exploration, serene, calm, expansive. It’s soft and as much as One Square Centimetre Of Light soothing, the vast sonic expanse of ‘Missing Day’ encapsulates the album’s conflicting and conflicted nature.
One Square Centimetre Of Light is overtly serene and beguiling, but hints at an undisclosed turmoil beneath the surface, a work which is a sonic balm, the result of a process to calm inner strife. As lights at the end of the tunnel go a mere on centimetre is barely there – but there it is. And it is hope. keep the focus on that.
I’m a little behind with things. Life has a habit of running away at pace. There’s no small element of truth in the observation that Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans – often attributed to John Lennon, but which first appeared in the mid-1950s, in an article in the Stockton Record of Stockton, California.
The latest release helmed by Iain J. Cole and released on his Sinners Music label is something of a departure. Although bearing the ‘various artists’ label, it is, in fact, a set of collaborations recorded with a number of different authors, whose works are narrated by other speakers. Conceived , curated, and the stories edited by David Martin, Iain J. Cole provides the musical accompaniment for the five – or seven – pieces which make up this monumental release.
Each track is a true longform work: all bar two are around – or substantially over – twenty minutes in duration.
Martin’s own contribution, ‘Relic’ evokes aspects of both The Man Who Fell to Earth and The War of the Worlds, as well as various other sci-fi tropes and no small dash of Lovecraft. Cole’s accompaniment is absolutely perfect: largely ambient, it’s composed with the most acute attention to detail, adding drama at precisely the right points, but without feeling in any way contrived or over-egged.
‘What Rupert Don’t Know’ – an exclusive short story written by Glen James Brown and narrated by Alexander King sees Cole linger in the background with a soundtrack that hangs at a respectful distance in the background, and takes the form of some minimal techno.
Gareth E Reese’s ‘We Are the Disease’, read by Daniel Wilmot, has a very different sound and feel. The vocals have a scratchy, treble-loaded reverby sound, somewhere between a radio just off-tune and Mark E Smith. It’s a bleak tale, an eco-horror delivered as a series of scientific reports, and with Cole’s ominous sonic backdrop, which has all the qualities of a BBC Radiophonic Workshop piece, the tension is compelling.
Claire Dean’s ‘The Unwish’, narrated by Helen Lewis marks a necessary shift in the middle of the album – a female voice is welcome, for a start, and so is the change in narrative voice. Women writers observe and relay differently, and the details are integral to the literary experience. Add to that a Northern intonation, and we find ourselves in another world
As a collection of speculative and environmental sci-fci, an endless sky is noteworthy for its quality. The bonus cuts – a brace of ‘soundtrack’ instrumentals showcase Cole’s capacity to create immersive slow techno works which draw heavily on dub. ‘The Rupert Zombie Soundtrack’ is a sedate, echo-heavy slow-bopping trudge, and then there’s the twenty-minute ‘The Blind Queen Soundtrack’, which is more atmospheric, more piano, less overtly techno.
Over the course of some two-and-a-bit hours, an endless sky gives us a lot to process. So much, in fact, that I’m not even sure it’s possible in a single sitting. What does it even all mean when taken together?
an endless sky is delicate, graceful, detailed. Beyond the narratives – which in themselves offer depth and detail – there is something uniquely compelling about an endless sky. Keep Watching…
Norman Westberg seems to be a man of few words. Through all of his years with Swans, I can only recall interviews with Gira and Jarboe, although I have for many a decade now admired Westberg’s stoic approach to playing: no showmanship, no seeking of attention, instead channelling the sound, often with infinite patience, screeding feedback and a single chord for an eternity. His solo material is considerably softer than Swans in tone, but no less brimming with tension and atmosphere, and this is nowhere more apparent than in his solo live sets, as I recall in particular from seeing him open for Swans in Leeds two years ago. Onstage, he was unassuming: in contrast, the sound he made, was powerful.
And so it is that the words which accompany Milan are not those of the artist, but Room40 label head Lawrence English, who recounts:
In 2016, I invited Norman Westberg to Australia for his first solo tour.
He’d been in Australia a few years before that, touring The Seer with Swans, and it was during this tour that I’d had the fortune to meet him. Since that time Norman and I have worked on a number of projects together. He very kindly played some of the central themes on my Cruel Optimism album and I had the pleasure to produced his After Vacation album.
Last year Norman shared a multichannel live recording with me from a tour where he was supporting Swans. The recording instantly transported me back to the first time I heard Norman perform.
Whilst many people know his more dynamic and tectonic playing associated with his band practice, Norman’s solo work is far more fluid. Often, when I hear him live, I imagine a vast ocean moving with a shimmer, as wind and light play across its surface.
Norman’s concerts are expeditions into just such a place. They are porous, but connected, a kind of living organism that is him, his instrument and his effects. He finds ways to create moments of connection which are at times surprising, and at others slippery, but always rewarding.
There’s a deeply performative way to his approach of live performance. There’s a core of the song that guides the way, a map of sound, but there’s also an extended sense of curiosity that allows unexpected discoveries to emerge.
Milan, which I had the pleasure to work on for Norman, captures this sense perfectly. It is a record that exists in its own right, but is of course tethered to his other works. It’s an expansive lens which reveals new perspectives on familiar vistas.
This almost perfectly encapsulates my own personal experience of witnessing Westberg performing. And Milan replicates that same experience magnificently. Admittedly, despite having listened to – and written about – a number of his solo releases, including After Vacation, I was unable to identify any of the individual pieces during or after the set. Such is the nature of ambient work, generally. Compositions delineate, merge, and while the composer will likely have given effects settings and so on, which are essential to their rendering, to most ears, it’s simply about the overall effect, the experience, the way movements – even if separable – transition from one to another.
This forty-minute set is dark, disturbing, immersive, somewhat suffocating in its density, from the very offset with disorientating oscillations of ‘An Introduction’. It flows into the next piece, ‘A Particular Tuesday’, where tinkling, cascading guitar notes begin to trickle down over that woozy undulation which rumbles and bubbles on from the previous track. And over time, it grows more warped, more distorted. Something about it is reminiscent of the instrumental passages between tracks on Swans’ Love of Life and White Light from the Mouth of Infinity, and for all the swirling abstraction, there are trilling trickles of optimism which filter through here.
Amidst a swell of bass-booming, whorling sound on sound, gentle, picked notes just – just – ring clear and give form to an amorphous sonic mass, but this too gradually achingly, passes to the next phase, and then the next again. ‘Once Before the Next’ is the sound of a struggle, like trying to land a small wooden rowing boat in a gale. And it’s in context of this realisation that there are many depths and layers to Milian, but none which make for an easy route in, and there is no easy ‘check this snippet’ segment. Instead, it’s the soundtrack which prefaced the ugly one w know is coming.
While Milan is obviously a live set – and at times, the overloading boom of the lower frequencies hit that level of distortion which only ever happens in a live setting, and the sheer warts-and-all, unedited, unmixed approach to this release is as remarkable as it is incredible in listening terms. This isn’t a tidied-up ‘studiofied’ reworking of a live show. Milan is a document of what happened, as it happened. You can feel the volume. The density and intensity are only amplified by the volume, and you really do feel as if you’re in the room. Let it carry you away.
And so we arrive at the end of another era in the epic history of Swans. When they called it a day in 1996 with Soundtracks for the Blind, and a farewell tour documented on Swans are Dead, it really did seem as if that was it. Swans had run their course, and the colossal Soundtracks double CD summarised everything they had achieved over
It may seem strange that the bookend to this phase of their career should be titled Birthing. But such is the cycle of life, and indeed, the avant-garde: death gives way to new life, to build anew one must first destroy. And so in this context, Birthing, which Gira has announced will be the last release of this epic, maximalist phase, makes sense. With a running time of a hundred and fifteen minutes, it’s comparable in duration to its predecessor, The Beggar, and The Glowing Man (a hundred and twenty-one minutes and a hundred and eighteen minutes respectively) , but on this outing, the individual pieces are all immense in proportion, with the album containing just seven tracks, with only one clocking in at less than ten minutes.
‘The Healers’ makes for a suitably atmospheric, slow-burning opener. Around seven minutes in, the gentle eddying begins to swell, like a breeze which wisps and ruffles the leaves on the trees – a minute or so later, the drums have entered the mix, and the ambient drift begins to take a more solid form, and there’s a change in the air temperature, the barometer plummets and the breeze becomes a wind. In no time, there’s a swirling wail of sound surrounding Gira’s increasingly exultant enunciations, but as he growls and mumbles and raises his voice higher, he’s increasingly drowned by the maelstrom. And yet, it’s nowhere near a crescendo, and I’m reminded of their set on the 2013 tour, where, having told my friend that having seen them in the same venue three years previous that they took volume to another level, the first twenty minutes of the set was loud, but not remarkably so – and then suddenly, there was a leap of around thirty percent that felt like a double-footed kick in the chest. Will it happen here? Around the fifteen minute mark, it tapers down to a haunting whistle of wind – and it’s the calm before the storm, as a raging tempest suddenly erupts, a frenzied wall of noise that has become their signature, and the song surges to a powerful sustained climax.
While the delivery is considerably less brutal than it was in the early 80s, Gira’s lyrics are still riven with dark and disturbing imagery, and now coloured with a hint of abstraction and madness, and this is nowhere more evident than on ‘I Am a Tower’, which was aired as a lyric video a little while ago. ‘With thin boneless fingers and pink polished nails, I’m searching for the fat folds of your blunder. Speak up, Dick! …Bring your fish-headed fixer to whisper in my ear. Please worry me here, tongue that victim in there…’ he intones like a cracked messianic cult leader against a backdrop of swirling drones. Attempting to unpick sense or meaning from it feels futile, and potentially traumatic, so instead, it’s perhaps experienced holistically, as a jumble of images and impressions, a fractured collage, a derangement of the senses whereby you allow it to transport you to another plane, away from anything concrete or grounded, beyond all that you know. Seemingly from nowhere, a motorik rhythm kicks in and we get something approximating a driving Krauty post-rock riff, hook and all. It could be Swans’ most pop moment since the White Light / Love of Life albums in the early 90s.
The title track arrives in a ripple of proggy synth that has a hint of Mike Oldfield about it, but gradually builds into a dramatic swell of sound, the likes of which has come to characterise the last decade of Swans, with a single chord struck repeatedly for what feels like an eternity. And then, from nowhere, they launch into something approximating a jig – on a loop, where the bass and drums simply hammer away repeatedly, like a stuck record. It is, if course, pure hypnotic magnificence. Gira’s words slip into soporific sedation amidst descending piano rolls. ‘Does it end? Will it end?’ he asks at the start of an extend wind-down, and it does feel like this would make a perfect gentle close – but there are more jarring, jolting ruptures to come, whipping up a truly punishing climax by way of a close, and by the end of the first disc – a full hour in duration – we’re left drained and hollowed out, tossed this way and that on a sonic – and emotional – tempest only Swans could create. Disc one, then, feels like a compete album. But this is a Swans release, and a landmark one, at that there isa whole further album’s worth of material yet.
‘Red Yellow’ begins in a dreamy drift, but soon slides into a warping drone pitched against another of those relentless, repetitive grooves, this time with some jazz horns freaking out in every direction. And at this point, there does arise the question of what new this iteration of Swans is offering at this point, but the immense, immersive soundscapes provide the answer in themselves. Swans have certainly evolved, but they have always done so gradually. The first half of the eighties was devoted to crushing slow grind, and you’d have to be a glutton for punishment to listen to more than one album in a sitting. The point is that Swans have always pleased themselves and made music that tests the listener’s limits, and Birthing is no exception.
Reviewing a Swans album is always a challenge, especially their comeback releases. They’re not about songs, and, broadly speaking, not really about impact in the way their early works were: instead, they’re about transcendence, about moving beyond mere music.
‘Guardian Spirit’ starts out textured an atmospheric, but ends full Merzbow, before ‘The Merge’ takes noise to the next level, albeit briefly. It’s as if Gira is toying with us. Perhaps he is, but when the noise erupts, it really erupts. ‘Rope’ returns us full cycle to there My Father Will Guide Me, while making an obvious connection with all phases of their career, through which ropes and hangings have been a perpetual theme.
Birthing is not an easy album, but it is one which requires listeners (and reviewers) to do something different in terms of approach. You don’t listen so much a feel it, and ride its endless waves: sometimes slow, gentle, at others an absolute roar, Birthing brings together everything Swans have done, and achieved, over the course of this iteration. It’s often overwhelming, and almost impossible to reduce to words. The second disc does feel softer, more abstract, and leaves on wondering precisely what the next phase will look or sound like.
Just three weeks after the previous instalment in the extensive LIFEFILES project from Mortality Tables, now in its third season, comes what promises to be the final instalment for now. And all proceeds from this release will be paid to CALM – the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It seems fitting, given that life can often feel relentless, amped-up stress and bewilderment, and the LIFEFILES series has presented, over its duration, works which take the listener into audio representations of calmer environs. I write this as someone who has, in recent years, factored a daily walk into their routine, as much for the mental health benefits as for the physical exercise. A change of scenery, particularly in open spaces and away from crowds, can be a transformative experience.
The premise of the series, for anyone who hasn’t seen any of my previous coverage, is that the artist is given a field recording, captured by Mat Smith, who runs the label, to respond to in any way they feel appropriate. For this release, the accompanying notes record that the two tracks have been constructed using ‘Source recordings made by Mat Smith at Charing Cross Underground Station on 27 November 2021, as part of a Hidden London tour of disused areas of the station and areas not normally accessible by the public.’
In addition, there’s an excerpt from Smith’s journal, from the same date, which reads as follows: “…walked around the old station section of the Jubilee Line that isn’t used any longer, went into a construction tunnel underneath Trafalgar Square which had a bend in it to avoid the foundations of Nelson’s Column, and then finished up in a ventilation shaft above the Northern Line platform…”
Xqui’s treatment of the recording is interesting, taking the form of the ‘classic’ experimental work, the likes of which you’ll find on labels like Editions Mego, with a single longform track occupying each side. The first, ‘Charing Cross Underground’, captures the voice of what may be a tour guide, spun out in reverb and glitching echo, while trans rumble in the distance, before slowly melting into ambient abstraction. It’s like hearing the ghosts of the underground, rising up through the disused tunnels, calling out to the present to remind us of the past beneath our feet. There are flickers of chatter, as if, here in the present, we continue to talk without ever stopping to listen. Voices warp, slow, slur, distort, and it makes for an unsettling fifteen minutes.
‘Reverb Underground’ goes slower, more spacious, more echoey. I had half-expected something resembling a dub version, but instead, Xqui slows and stretches everything beyond recognition, creating a slow-motion blur, a crawling ambient drone. The sound simply hangs, dense, suffocating. Time stalls, and you find yourself floating, in suspense, in a fugue state, as the sound lifts free of context and embraces pure abstraction.
What Xqui manages to convey on this release is a sense of history, of space, of time, and the way we’re so busy rushing about in our daily lives that we never pause to contemplate the echoes of the past which exist, and linger all about us.
Landscapes, in all their forms, have always been significant in the inspiration for loscil works. Scott Morgan is an artist who seems sensitive to his surroundings, and also responsive to them when it comes to the creative process.
This is true of many artists, of course, and any artist who isn’t in some way influenced by their surroundings and the things which happen around them are… largely incomprehensible to me on a personal level. It simply seems unnatural to create art in a void, detached from experience. I’m not advocating that all art should be grounded in the here and now, or even in reality, but even the most imaginative of scenarios require an element of grounding in order to be credible. The most wildly-imagined sci-fi and fantasy only work when there’s a demonstration of an understanding of human character, or how dialogue works, and so on.
The misty, murky shadings of the cover are replicated in sonic form on ‘Arrhythmia’, the first of the album’s nine compositions. Where are indecipherable whispers eddying behind the piano notes, which gradually blur into a watercolour wash, and a slow pulsing tide slowly rises, only to fall and resurface and fall again.
Interweaving layers create an aural latticework on ‘Bell Flame’, the different tempos of the rippling waves merge together effortlessly to create a shimmering, ever-shifting fabric that’s soft, almost translucent. These supple, subtle ambient works are far from abstract, although their forms are vague to distinguish, and single release ‘Candling’, it so proves, is exemplary of the album’s finely-balanced layerings and contrasts.
With ‘Sparks’ preceding ‘Ash Clouds’, one might be tempted to perceive some form of narrative, or at least a linearity in their pairing: the two six-minute pieces drift invisibly from one to the next, although ‘Ash Clouds’ is heavier, darker, an elongated drone providing one of the album’s moodiest, most oppressive pieces. ‘Flutter’ is appropriately titles, and warps and bends in a somewhat disorientating, disconcerting fashion, creating an effect not dissimilar from the room-spin of inebriation, while the title track concludes the album with a lot of very little, as long, low droning notes hang heavy. It’s pure desolation, and yet… there is something which rises upwards other than smoke and flame – a gasping breath and the sound of a thousand souls transported in vapour.
There are beats on this album, but they’re almost subliminal, a heartbeat underneath the mix, and provide a sense of orientation like fence posts visible through fog or low cloud on a barren moor. More often than not, though, the rhythms come from the interactions between the different elements as they meet and then separate once again. The abstract nature of the work somehow compels the listener to not only fill the blank spaces with their own sensory and emotional input, but also to visualise in the mind’s eye what they may look like. As such, Lake Fire, while largely tranquil, sedate, and even soothing in parts, is stimulating, and to more than just the ears.
It’s been a couple years since we last heard new material from Harold Nono, enigmatic purveyor of weirdy electronica, and platformed by the go-to label for weirdy folky worldy electronica, Bearsuit Records. And Faro is suitably strange, and, well, Bearsuity.
It doesn’t start out so: ‘Raukar’ is primarily sedate, piano-led, sedate, strolling, and overall, feels quite calming, despite jangles and scrapes of dissonance whispering away in the background. As the ambience trickles its way into balmy abstraction, we feel a sense of discomfort, and while the expansive ‘Sketch for Faro’ is soothing, expansive, cinematic, and feels like it could easily be an excerpt from Jurassic Park or another sweeping passage from a big-budget family-friendly movie, there are undercurrents which are subtle but nevertheless discernible which add an element of ‘otherness’ to it, particularly the abstract, almost choral vocal which rises near the end.
An EP consisting of only four tracks, Faro is a brief document, but Nono brings together many elements within this succinct work. Besides, it’s not all about length, right? Faro is sonically rich, imaginative, and ambitious in scope and scale. It feels expansive, transporting the listener over huge landscapes of trees and hills and field and planes, and you kinda feel carried away on it all in a largely pleasant way, despite the niggles of tension which creep in. And during ‘The Hour of The Wolf’ everything begins to explode and expand like some kind of galactic simulation, and suddenly, from nowhere, there are beats are blasts of distortion and everything somehow crumbles, and as silence falls, you find yourself standing, dazed, amidst rubble and ruins wondering what just happened.
While many of the elements common to Nono’s work are present here, Faro does seem like something of a development, expending in the direction of 2023’s ‘Sketch for Strings’ and moving further from the more disjointed, collagey compositional forms of earlier works. It’s less overtly jarring, less conspicuously weird, but don’t for a second think that Nono has gone normal on us – because Faro is subtle in the way it unsettles, and the last couple of minutes completely rupture the atmosphere forged gently and carefully over the rest of the EP. And this is why it’s both classic Nono and quintessential Bearsuit – because whatever your expectations, it is certain to confound them.
Returning for their eighth album, A-Sun Amissa, purveyors of drone-centric ambience centred around founder Richard Knox pull back from the rather larger avant-rock sound of 2024’s Ruins Era to concentrate once more on ‘unsettling drones and claustrophobic atmospheres’. Knox is joined for the third successive release by Luke Bhatia and Claire Knox, indicating that this is a fairly stable lineup, and perhaps this has been a factor in the album’s exploratory, evolutionary approach.
The promise is that the record’s ‘washed out and ethereal sound drags electric guitar, clarinet, voice and piano through pillows of reverb and distortion to build heaving, desolate dronescapes. Moving through dense, oppressive passages of sound and diffusing into sections of gloomy, haunting restraint. We Are Not Our Dread is filled with majestic, textural detail. It envelops and, at times, smothers you before releasing just at the right moment, resolving in a billowing, melancholic, distorted reverie.’
The first thing that strikes me – as is often the case with any project centred around Knox – is the evocative nature of the title. Perhaps I’m feeling uncommonly sensitive right now, but this one in particular lands with an unexpected impact, and as much as the implication is one of positivity – no, we are not our dread, our dread does not define us or dictate our lives – there is equally the emphasis on the fact that we have that dread. And not you, or I, but us, together, collectively. And so it is that dread become the focus, that thing which looms large over not only the title or the album, but our lives. Why do we have this dread? It would not be an overstatement that the pandemic changed everything: the world that we knew lurched on its axis and no-one knew how to handle it. And since then, insanity has run free. 9/11 may have rattled the rhythm of life for a time, but not it seems that the entire world spent the pandemic years just waiting to wage war, and now nothing is safe or predictable – not your job, your home, your ability to post stuff online. You don’t need to be a prominent protestor or social agitator to attract the wrong kind of attention. The dread hangs over every moment now. We thought we had seen the worst when COVID swept the globe and lockdowns dominated our lives, and began to breathe a collective sight od relief when things began to retract, as we looked with optimism toward the ‘new normal’. But who ever anticipated this today as the new normal the future held?
We Are Not Our Dread consists of four fairly lengthy instrumental compositions, and ‘Electric Tremble’ arrives in a dense cloud of ominous noise which immediately builds tension, and if the rolling piano which drifts in shortly afterwards is gentle, even soothing, the undercurrents of rumbling discord and distant thunder which persist maintain a sense of discomfort which is impossible to ignore.
Ever since his early days with Glissando, melding post-rock with ambient tropes, Knox has had an ear for the unsettling, deftly manoeuvring elements of the soft and gentle with the spine-tingling. And while the eleven-minute ‘All The Sky Was Empty’ is a quintessential work of epic post-rock abstract ambience, rich in texture as it turns like a heavy cloud billowing and building but without an actual storm breaking, instead dispersing to offer breaking light and a sense of hope, the wandering clarinet brings a vaguely jazz element to the sound.
‘Sings Death or Petals’ arrives on trails of feedback and rumbling guitar noise, and is immediately darker, and those dark undercurrents continue with crackles and rumbles and elongated drones which persist beneath the ghostly, ethereal voices and reverb-heavy piano and picked guitar notes. At times, this bears the hallmarks of latter-day Earth, but at the same time there’s a less structured, less motif-oriented approach to the composition, which leaves much open space. I still can’t choose between death or petals here. It builds to a churning whorl, before the final track, ‘Our Hearts Bent As Crooked Lightning’ stirs from a rippling array of simmering noise and evolves into a colossus of rumbling drones, and, over the course of ten-and-a-half minutes, grows supple with softer waves of expansive synth which remind you to breathe again. For all the fuzz and broad swells of abstract, buzzing noise that’s equal parts gripping and soothing, the overall effect is sedative, and welcome.
We Are Not Our Dread leads the listener through some challenging moments, and as each listener experiences works differently, as I hear the final soaring strains of ‘Our Hearts Bent As Crooked Lightning’ this strikes me personally as dark and challenging. The intentions may be quite different, but this is undeniably a work which is sonically ambitious, spacious, resonant. Even as the tension lifts, the mood remains, like a dream you can’t shake, like the paranoia that persists even when you’ve dome nothing wrong.
That We Are Not Our Dread is true, and so is the fact that, to quote from Fight Club, you are ‘not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.’ And you are not your dread. It may at times possess you, but this, this is not it. This, however, is a great album.
The jazzosphere has a way of throwing surprises, and in the most unexpected ways. Ledley’s eponymous debut, which sees acclaimed electroacoustic improvisational musicians Raph Clarkson (trombone, FX), Chris Williams (saxophone, FX) and Riaan Vosloo (electronics, post-production), is – let me check this – yes, a tribute to legendary Spurs footballer, Ledley King. You didn’t see that one coming, did you?
My knowledge of football is scant: I was born in Lincoln and so feel obliged to follow The Imps – by which I mean check on the scores on the BBC when I remember, and I sometimes watch England international, when I have time and can bear to – but clearly, this does not make me a football fan. But I do have a deep interest in music that’s out of the ordinary, the weirder the better. And this is pretty weird.
Ledley is pitched as ‘is a celebration of improvisation, friendship, and shared passions, blending music and sport into an exploration of community, belonging, and resilience – one of the most extraordinary tributes ever paid to a footballer.’
Although split into eleven tracks digitally, the album is essentially two longform compositions, corresponding with the two sides of the vinyl release, which contain loosely-defined segments, or passages, which flow into one another. Some of these are dramatic, film-score like, with the trappings of bold orchestral bursts, only without the full spectrum of instruments, lending these pieces the feel of somewhat stunted reimaginings of John Williams scores. But then there are the meandering straight-up jazz meanderings, trilling, tooting woodwind, and moments that sound more like some kind of noir soundtrack excerpt – you can envisage some old black and white movie version of something by Raymond Chandler – and then the more extravagant, indulgent moments, which are, it must be stressed, brief and infrequent, evoke the spirit of Kerouac and The Beats. The association with The Beat Generation is something I’ll park here, as The Beats were as stylistically diverse in their writing as The Romantics, and there was nothing jazz about Burroughs. I digress, but to do so feels appropriate: while it does have a musical flow to it Ledley is not a narrative album, and it in no way presents a sense of sequentiality.
The second half is most definitely more sedate, and more prone to abstract wanderings, as the instruments criss-cross, snake, and interweave through and around one another, before tapering down into spacious, semi-ambient, almost drone-line expanses which yawn and stretch in one direction and swoon and glide in the other. Towards the end, it feels as if the batteries are slowly winding down to a low drone. There are bird-like squawks and slow, heraldic horns ringing out, but it’s more the sound of mournful defeat than triumph and celebration. Perhaps this is intentional, and perhaps an understanding of the context is beneficial here Or maybe not: hearing the final tapering tones fade over the horizon, Ledley could as easily be a hymnal to seabirds as it is to a football player, and the beauty of music, particularly instrumental works, is that regardless of their intent, there is ultimately a sense of interpretation which lies with the receiver. Personal experiences, life in the moment, these things come to weigh on how we receive and interpret, and determine not only pour reaction and response but the relationship we have with a given work of art.
Having a knowledge of Ledley King and his career may, or may not, be beneficial when it comes to this album. Sonically, it’s interesting, it slides between moods and spaces, pulling the listener along through them. No naff sporting analogy is required in creating a punchline for this one: it’s simply intriguing, and the musicianship is of an undeniable quality.
I sometimes wonder if Aidan Baker has secretly mastered cloning, since he has seemingly pursued multiple careers simultaneously. He’s been active for some time, it’s true, but even the compressed version of his bio makes for quite the read:
As a member of Nadja, Hypnodrone Ensemble, Noplace Trio, Tavare and a host of other projects and solo endeavours, Baker’s prolific output remains vital as he continues to explore a vast terrain of sounds and genres across a 30 year musical career.
His latest work, & You Still Fall In, we learn, was recorded at Baker’s home studio in Berlin, and ‘hints at the mood and songcraft of the likes of Midwife, Hood, Stina Nordenstam and Movietone. The album is a compelling listen, stripped down to mostly electric guitar and vocals and moving at a distinctly glacial pace. The intimacy of the hushed tones and muted textures lean into a dark, hypnotic and gentle stillness that lingers in the air…’
That fact that this is a truly solo work, with Baker taking care of guitar, bass, drum machine, and vocals is perhaps key to its low-key, introspective atmosphere. Intimate is the word: on the title track which raises the curtain on this soporific sequence of compositions, the acoustic guitar strum hovers to a drone, wavering in volume, seeming to drift, seeming to warp, to fade, you can hear fingertips swiping on strings between frets, and Baker’s vocal is but a mumble; you hear sound, but the words don’t fall free to clarity.
‘Drowning Not Waving’ blends rumbling bass distortions with glitching drum machine and an air of uneasiness: the experience is every inch the struggle the title suggests. And that title… the phrase may have become a popular adaptation of the line from Stevie Smith’s 1957 poem and a metaphor for depression, but to momentarily reflect on the actuality of this all-too -common experience is to recognise the extent to which we, as a society, still – STILL – fail to identify a person in crisis. ‘Cheer up, it might never happen’, we hear often. But it does happen. Even well-meaning friends will diminish the spasms of crisis with ‘well, my life’s shit or probably worse, actually’ type responses. And each such response is like a hand on the head, pushing down. And yes, I speak from experience, and not so long ago I was out for a walk in an attempt to find some tranquillity, some headspace, some time with my thoughts. A dog, off lead, ran up to me and began barking and hassling. Its owners called it back and then groused at me for my failure to smile and thank them. “Ooh, someone’s lost their smile,” the guy said loudly, purposefully so that I could hear. No fucking shit. But you know nothing about my life. My wife died recently and I am not in the mood for being hassled by dogs, and I owe you twats nothing, least of all a smile. I continued on my way without a word, let alone a smile, and there was no point in waving. I was simply drowning. The moral? People may have stuff going on you know nothing about, so don’t be a twat. And anger is only a few degrees along from depression. Music has a boundless capacity to inspire the most unexpected responses.
Things stray into even more minimal, lo-fi territory with ‘You Say You Can See Inside Me’, which captures the spirit of Silver Jews and the soul of some of Michael Gira’s solo recordings. It’s muffled, droning, barely there, even. And yet, somehow, its sparsity accentuates its emotional intensity. There’s almost a confessional feel to this, but it’s a confession so mumbled, either through shame, embarrassment, or plain unwillingness.
On the surface, & You Still Fall In is a gentle work, defined by mellow, picked acoustic guitar and vocals so chilled as to be barely awake – but everything lies beneath the surface. And the surface isn’t as tranquil as all that: ‘When The Waves They Parted’ may be defined by a rippling surge but there’s discomfort beneath the ebb, and the reverb-soaked crunch of ‘Still Cold from the Rain’ is bleak and lugubrious.
Although presented as two separate pieces, ‘Thin Film Interface’ is a continuous thirteen-minute expanse of murky ambience with lead guitar work which soars and echoes over a shifting sonic mist. It hovers in the background, yet simultaneously alters the texture and colour of the air, relaxing but with an unresolved tension beneath.
& You Still Fall In is a difficult album to place – but why should that be necessity? A lot happens, an at the same time, it doesn’t. & You Still Fall In is sparse, drifting between acoustic and altogether simpler acoustic instrumentation. But instead of dissecting the details or reasoning, I’m going to point to the album, and simply say ‘listen to this’. Because it’s simply incredible.
Aural Aggravation 