This album is the culmination of over ten years musical practice by the classically trained Jo Wills, a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and co-founder of WW records with Dutch producer and instrumentalist Guy Wampa.
Wills’s music is almost entirely analogue and inspired by the countryside of Somerset including blots on the landscape like power stations.
Wills says “The process started with field recordings taking structure and context from landscape, then developing that structure through improvisation. using feedback and saturation as tools for organic growth, creating sound that is always moving, responding and developing.”
Taken as a whole there’s a dense, faintly menacing quality to the music that reflects unease rather than tranquillity. Only the penultimate track (Dark Luminous) features vocals (by Rhia Parker). Her singing is either wordless or lyrically ambiguous and thus serves to give extra texture to the piece rather than elaborate upon the tune's possible meaning.
This eight-track album will inevitably be branded as Post-Rock although by now this genre is so diverse that the label doesn’t really say much. A track like Augur has such a raw, pulsating rock edge that it doesn’t need to be tagged as post-anything. The drums of Guy Wood are high in the mix and these mitigate against any meditative ambient tendencies. The percussion is also particularly effective on the brooding scuzziness of Crows.
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A title like Shoot Like A Meteor From Dizzy Height suggests that the slow-building atmospherics of Godspeed you! Black Emperor are one of Wills's influences although this track is significantly more synth-based than GYBE.
I imagine this impressive album will struggle to find an audience but I also suspect that this will not overly concern the participants. The important thing is that it’s out in the world and, despite its relative obscurity, it's definitely worth taking the time to make contact with.
Listen to the album on Bandcamp
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