Gentle, echo-soaked instrumentation consisting of chiming, picked strings and an unusual array of instruments conspire to form something that elegantly drapes itself across ambient, folk and post-rock.
Darker shadows hang over ‘Orka’s Dream’ as tense, dissonant strings draw over a foreboding piano before slowly fading to a gentler place, where vibraphones and glockenspiels dance… there’s a glorious upswell of sound on ‘A Shimmer of Bronce’ a celebratory dance of Morris dancers skipping in a woodland clearing, while ‘May 30, 2012 ‘ has something of the medieval ballad about it, albeit swamped in reverb as though playing in an empty cloister…. but these moments of light are always challenged by darkness, unseen hands pushing downwards towards the unknown. The delicate and fragile beauty of ‘Bees and Ghosts’, which closes disc 1, is annihilated by a rising mass of distortion that finally obliterates all sound, leaving only silence.
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Heavy, sonorous scrapes and drones drag through ‘Anthem for a Windmill’ at the start of disc 2, and the bleak atmosphere continues to creep across the dolorous ‘Because of the Slow Shutter Speed’, dense grey fog hanging thick as a bell chimes a funeral tone. The sedate ‘Samsa’ provides some levity. Against an insistent chiming loop, a theramin creates haunting, ghostly tone that grows and rises until all the spirits flee purgatory in a fearful frenzy on ‘Laid Open’ before a cleaning monastic chant echoes around a cacophony of chimes on the final track, ‘Show Me the Shadow of the Sun’. In the dying minutes, these all end, to replaced by a low, slow drone to fade…
RM74 Online
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