FortDax (Capital F, capital D: one word) has a new album of electronic glee out at last and it’s LOUD.
BATTLES and many others are making the boundaries between electronic and ensemble instrumental music less relevant these days, and this set of tunes from Darren Durham is in that generous audience-gathering spirit. I would not be at all surprised to hear great lumps of this turning up in places where bills get paid and musicians are allowed to consider the possibility of earning a living. It's good, it’s honest and it’s approachable.
A demand for live shows, and the communicative possibilities of immediately created sound make it inevitable that solitary artists reach out and use what makes the music work. Now that no one turns a hair at laptops, decks, sound processors or anything else in any set up the evangelism for pure machine code makes less sense.
So sit up, stand up, leap about – it’s FortDax (Capital F, capital D; one word). It’s a joy. I loved Durham's last full length release. How long ago? He had been on a bill with Low and filled Leeds Parish Church with glorious Japanese voices and huge bass notes. It was "Folly", on Tug Boat Records in 2003. It could have been the last century.
This album has, inter alia, a Celtic lilt, a dancing joyous blend of samples, loops and ambient recordings with the FortDax Tiny Ensemble on hand to jam along. It has melancholy and wide piano/bass chords. It has water and stars and the distant thunder of the drums of war and requiem. It has some beautiful string sections and resonant fretted instruments too.
Not everything works – "test-pressing seventy-two" is an interlude of background music that absorbs one minute thirty nine seconds without paying the rent in my head space. But when there's so much else to gorge on and so many changes in sound and feel I'm just pretending to be a proper reviewer by even mentioning such a thing.
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Track 9, "White Divers" is the album's definitive track. At ten minutes it looms in from the distance with a rock drum pulse and excoriating synth noises. Very four-four Dark Lords of Doom. The sounds serially unthread and scatter, like sheets of rough cloth being torn into finer coloured fragments, streaming in a high wind. At about four minutes the drumming drops out and a large bass shows up with some edgy live sounding free form stuff before the synthy parts gather again for some elation-stirring chords. For a moment there I had a prog rock flash back and Rick Wakeman strode the Earth again. In a very good way. The final four minutes achieve some kind of reconciliation, meeting the doomy opening half way and leaving us with a strong positive pulse that sets a great mood for the personal reflection of f.m. that closes it all.
The old world feel of that piece, a childhood memory of a grandparent perhaps, is a reverberating closure to the shrouded 78 crackle and music-teacher piano of the opening "1909 (pour mme. emile mouillere)". The delicate positioning is very touching, lightly poetic, and you could miss it.
Prettiest tune? "A Beverley Mythic". Lovely. Folktronic, I'd say.
FortDax are doing a couple of live appearances in Brighton and London – if they're as good as the CD, you're in for a treat.
www.fedge.net/fortdax
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