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August/September 2015 – an American summer/fall tour for The Collection and Lowland Hum

the Collection tune up…

Today the Collection begin a two-month American tour. Veering mostly around the South, the Midwest, the West Coast and the Pacific North-Western states, it takes in (bar a mid-tour rendezvous with the Viper Room in Los Angeles) the kind of intimate, audience-engaging venues I’d love to discover on an American road trip of my own – assorted music bars, small theatres, coffee shops. This is in keeping with the band’s stated ethos – based in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Collection describe themselves less as a band and more of “a community of artists, nurses, farmers, students, and everyone in between doing life together.” According to bandleader David Wimbish, “we don’t want fans, we want family. It’s incredible to us that people would even listen to our music, and it’s so much more important for us to connect with those people than to figure out how to get fans.”

The second Collection album, ‘Ars Moriendi’, was released last summer but only crossed my ears recently via a brief and now-expired Noisetrade offer (you can still go there and pick up a free sampler if you want to). I love discovering inspiring records by accident, and ‘Ars Moriendi’ is one of the more emotionally commanding works I’ve heard for a good while. Swelling up from a core of seven people to as many as twenty-five on record, the Collection dip into rock, folk, gospel, barndance, bluegrass, soul and mariachi. Adding banjo, brass, strings, reeds, autoharps, and didgeridoos to the usual pianos, guitar and drums results in a heady grand-medicine-show of a sound.

This in itself isn’t new. There are plenty of expansive Americana folk-rock ensembles peppered with diverse instrumentation; and (either by coincidence, intent or just common feeling) the Collection echo strains of music which we’ve already heard via The Polyphonic Spree, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens and Guillemots; not to mention The Band and Mercury Rev, or the reedy, distracted, keening tones David shares with Damien Rice. What gives them the Collection their particular edge is the driving verve and commitment with which they play. Despite their hollering utopian tendencies of their singalongs they’re unconcerned with party robes or cute, culty psychedelic trappings. Instead, their music is imbued with communitarian impulses and a fumbling, ever-hopeful sense of personal connections.

Integral to this is the band’s Christianity. Almost every one of David Wimbish’s songs is studded and seeded with Biblical allusions and resonances, yet he’s never rendered complacent and conformist by his faith. Rather, he’s caught up in it – a tender-hearted radical questioning and examining his beliefs, challenging his own conscience and the orthodoxy, compelled to decry the church’s seams of bigotry and exceptionalism whenever he stumbles over them. At the same time, David is clearly fascinated by the church’s central mystery of life renewed, setting it (with some pain and trepidation) against the deaths of friends and family that cut grief-lines into his songs and filter both darkness and weight into the Collection’s music. Like me, you don’t have to actually be a believer to be moved by David’s explorations and exhortations as he travels from exuberance to despair, from buoyant encouragement to audible tear-swallowing. After all, the best Christian music is always a little wracked and cracked: something in which their faith reveals people to themselves, and perhaps a little more of their humanity to others.

On this tour, the Collection will be accompanied by two of their Greensboro compatriots – husband-and-wife duo Daniel and Lauren Goans, a.k.a. Lowland Hum. Fond of the intimacy of house concerts, they ought to make a good foil and complement to the Collection’s inclusive spirit. Hopefully Daniel and Lauren will get the chance to carry out their usual immersive, synaesthesic gig experience – staging and dressing the playing environment with props and essential oil burners, passing out hand-bound lyric books to their audience, and generally eliding the boundaries between the many ways a person can experience a concert.

Lowland Hum get immersed (photo by Griffin Hart Davis)

Even if not, there’s still the music from their eponymous debut album (released in April this year) to consider. ‘Lowland Hum’ is an enthrallingly American art-pop record in which country-duo harmonies and Atlantic folk guitar intertwines with multi-instrumental Portishead/Mandalay trip hop, and in which songs flick unsettlingly between sports arena scale and backyard porch intimacy in the space of a breath. Lyrical preoccupations (fragmented but lucid) span ageing, the shifting internal perspective of growing and growth, or suburban disassociations; or cover the life of Toulouse-Lautrec in ten short scattered lines.

Sharing voices, instrumentation and production between them, Lauren and Dan sometimes seem to phase in and out of each other (as on Rolling And Rolling, a touching first-person meditation on a boy’s budding adolescence on which both singers take turns to voice his slipping thoughts). Similarly, they move through genres like purposeful ghosts. A song like Jack Of Hearts (a study of the dangers of power and charisma) can begin as a country cautionary, fray into psychedelic folk, clatters its sticks into complications and end up as a layered ambient march.

On a couple of dates the Collection and Lowland Hum will be joined by other performers. In Birmingham, Alabama, they’ll be playing with folk-rock trio War Jacket (who describe themselves as both warm and haunted, like their hometown); in San Francisco by Gothic-tinged chamber-pop crooner (and Stephen Merritt collaborator) Jon DeRosa; and in Greely, Colorado by both the Denver art-and-music collective Giants & Pilgrims and the outlaw-country cowpunker Matt Davis.

Full tour dates below:

Ashland Coffee and Tea, 100 North Railroad Avenue, Ashland, Virginia, USA, Thursday 20th August 2015
Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E Main St, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, Friday 21st August 2015
Hanesbrands Theater @ Milton Rhodes Centre for the Arts, 251 Spruce Street North, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, Saturday 22nd August 2015
Local 506, 506 West Franklin St, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA, Sunday 23rd August 2015
The Pour House, 1977 Maybank Highway, Charleston, South Carolina, USA, Monday 24th August 2015
The Camp House, 832 Georgia Avenue, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, Wednesday 26th August 2015
Eddie’s Attic, 515 North McDonough Street, Decatur, Georgia, USA, Thursday 27th August 2015
The Nick, 2514 10th Avenue South, Birmingham, Alabama, USA,
Friday 28th August 2015 (supported by War Jacket)
The Beatnik, 615 Toulouse Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, Saturday 29th August 2015
Common Grounds, 1123 South 8th Street, Waco, Texas, USA, Sunday 30th August 2015
(House Show), 407 Mignon Lane, Houston, Texas, USA, Monday 31st August 2015 (ticketed – apply via link)
Mohawk, 912 Red River Street, Austin, Texas, USA, Wednesday 2nd September 2015
The Viper Room, 8852 West Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA, Sunday 6th September 2015
Hotel Utah, 500 4th Street, San Francisco, California, USA, Wednesday 9th September 2015 (supported by Jon DeRosa)
Fremont Abbey, 4272 Fremont Avenue North, Seattle, Washington, USA, Friday 11th September 2015
Kelly’s Olympian, 426 SW Washington Street, Portland, Oregon, USA, Sunday 13th September 2015
Old Nick’s Pub , 211 Washington Street, Eugene, Oregon, USA, Tuesday 15th September 2015
Reef, 105 South 6th Street, Boise, Idaho, USA, Thursday 17th September 2015
The Dawg Pound, 3550 South State Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Saturday 19th September 2015
Moxi Theatre, 802 9th Street, Greeley, Colorado, USA, Monday 21st September 2015 (supported by Giants & Pilgrims, Matt Davis)
Downtown Artery, 252 Linden Street, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA, Tuesday 22nd September 2015
Hi-Dive, 7 South Broadway, Denver, Colorado, USA, Wednesday 23rd September 2015
The Tank Room, 1813 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri, USA, Thursday 24th September 2015

Woven in and out of this tour, Lowland Hum will be playing some separate headlining dates of their own (shared, on one North Carolinan occasion, by church-and-country songwriter Josiah Early).

Horizon Records, 2-A West Stone Avenue, Greenville, South Carolina, USA, Tuesday 25th August 2015
Westmont College, 955 La Paz Road, Santa Barbara, California, Saturday 5th September 2015
Old Orchard Church, 640 Amelia Avenue, Webster Groves, St Louis, Missouri, USA, Saturday 26th September 2015
The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Avenue, Asheville, North Carolina, USA, Sunday 25th October 2015 (supported by Josiah Early)

Tags: Birmingham (Alabama - USA), Denver (Colorado - USA), Giants & Pilgrims, Greenboro (North Carolina - USA), intriguingly mixed bags, Jon DeRosa, Josiah Early, Linville (Virginia - USA), live concerts, Los Angeles (USA), Louisville (Kentucky - USA), Lowland Hum, Matt Davis, men and women singing together, The Collection, War Jacket

July 2015 – upcoming London gigs this week – LUME on Thursday (Nick Costley-White/Bleep Test); Daylight Music on Saturday (The UCC Handbell Ringers/Ryan Teague/Ellie Lovegrove, with Angèle David-Guillou)

13 Jul

More upcoming London gigs this week. Firstly, various kinds of jazz on Thursday…

Nick Costley-White & Bleep Test (LUME @ Long White Cloud, 151 Hackney Road, Hoxton, London, E2 8JL, UK, Thursday 16th July, 8.00pm

This week at LUME… original and improvised music. We’ve got a tasty double bill for you this Thursday with solo guitar explorations and an exciting new electronic jazz ensemble mixing beats and tunes. Should be a great evening of cutting edge new sounds. Entry is one Bank of England note of your choice. (£5, £10, £20… £50???!)

Bleep Test (Fraser Smith – tenor sax/effects; Joe Webb – synths; Lloyd Haines – drums; Matthew Read – bass) combine house, breaks, drum & bass and jazz. Analog synths, electric drums and a screaming saxophone tie this band to the growing scene of exciting, genre defying music groups emerging from London’s creative underground. Fiery grooves and memorable melodies push these musicians out of the traditional jazz improvisation realm and into another soundscape that hits hard.

Nick Costley-White is fast becoming one of the most in demand young guitarists in the London jazz scene. With a developed sound and individual voice on his instrument, Nick has had the opportunity to perform professionally with some of the country’s finest musicians including Stan Sulzmann, Jeff Williams, Gareth Lockrane, Tom Challenger, Martin Speake, Ivo Neame, Tommy Andrews, Jon Scott, Dave Hamblet and Josh Arcoleo.
Nick studied jazz and classical guitar at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Phil Robson, Colin Oxley and John Parricelli, graduating with first class honours and awarded the 2011 Yamaha Jazz Scholarship for Outstanding Musicians.

See you there!

On Saturday, there’s the last Daylight Music concert of the season, with definite sacred and classical tinges to it…

Daylight Music 197: The UCC Handbell Ringers + Ryan Teague + Ellie Lovegrove (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN – Saturday 18th July, 12pm to 2pm)

A Bells and Bronze afternoon will ring out this season of Daylight in style.

The UCC Handbell Ringers are a select group of nineteen young people, ages fourteen to eighteen, from the University Christian Church in Fort Worth, Texas. This Church is situated across the street from the Texas Christian University School of Music and since its founding in 1873, the music ministry has been an integral part in the life of the church. The UCC Ringers ring one of the church’s two five-octave sets of English handbells cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London. The bell choirs have a long tradition of musical excellence and have been an integral part of the life of the church for many years. They have toured regularly. In addition to being the first bell choir to perform at Westminster Abbey, they have played in worship services and in concert at the Royal Festival Hall, York Minster, St. Mary Redcliffe Church in Bristol and the Collegiate Church of St. Mary in Warwick; and at Exeter, Bristol, Gloucester, Canterbury, Winchester, Salisbury, Christ Church Oxford and Coventry Cathedrals.

Ryan Teague is a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist based in Bristol. His music combines acoustic instrumentation and arrangements with electronic and processed material, the results of which incorporate minimalist, ambient and electro-acoustic music. Ryan has released numerous albums and EPs on labels including Village Green, Sonic Pieces and Type Records. He also produces music and sound design for various film & TV productions and has spent an extended period of time in Indonesia studying Javanese gamelan music. This afternoon’s music will also feature a new and exclusive composition premiere ‘Storm Or Tempest May Stop Play’ by Ryan Teague with Gamelan Ensemble.

From a musical family in Ware, Hertfordshire, Ellie Lovegrove began learning the trumpet at school aged seven. She later played principal trumpet with the Hertfordshire County Youth Orchestra, joined the National Youth Orchestra at the Proms, and went on to study at the Royal College of Music, London. Here she received tuition from Paul Beniston, Neil Brough and Michael Laird, winning the Brass Ensemble Prize and the Brass Concerto Competition. Ellie continued her studies with Kristian Steenstrup and Mark David. Professionally, Ellie enjoys a varied freelance career. Her work as an orchestral player includes concerts and broadcasts with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Royal Ballet Sinfonia and the Britten Sinfonia. She has also deputised for the the Royal Shakespeare Company as the onstage trumpeter in their production of ‘The Roaring Girl’ and in their recent production of ‘Henry IV’ at the Barbican. As a chamber musician, Ellie has performed at The London Handel Festival on period instruments, and has enjoyed working with Chaconne Brass, including a commercial recording of a new work by Bob Chilcott with Wells Cathedral Choir. Her trumpet and organ duo Illumina have performed recitals at St Paul’s Cathedral, Fairfield Halls and Alexandra Palace, and have recently commissioned a new work from composer Paul Burke.

If that wasn’t enough magic then Angèle David-Guillou will plays some chiming melodies on the piano. Angèle is best known for a brace of critically acclaimed electro-acoustic dream-pop albums under the alias Klima, for her signature contributions to cult Anglo-French ensemble Piano Magic and for cameos on albums by the likes of The Go! Team, Peter Astor and Ginger Ale. In contrast to much of her oeuvre to date, Angèle’s debut album under her given name is a largely, if not exclusively, instrumental work, predominantly consisting of melodically opulent, emotionally compelling compositions for the grand piano (and, on three songs, a Wurlitzer electric piano), many of them emblazoned with vivid arrangements for strings, woodwind, musical saw and percussion.

Free entry, but donations are (as ever) encouraged.

Tags: almost acoustic, Angèle David-Guillou, bells, Bleep Test, chamber ensemble, Daylight Music (event), electric guitar music, Ellie Lovegrove, Fraser Smith, Joe Webb, Klima, live concerts, Lloyd Haines, London (England), LUME (event), Matthew Read, Nick Costley-White, Piano Magic, piano music, Ryan Teague, The UCC Handbell Ringers, trumpet music

December 2010 – single & track reviews – Soaring on Their Pinions’ ‘Veni, Veni, Emmanuel’ (featuring Whitney Drury)(“just the singing and what can be teased out of it”)

20 Dec

Soaring On Their Pinions: ‘Veni, Veni, Emanuel’

Thinking drummers are to be treasured. Not just the sparky virtuosi cast up by jazz and progressive rock – clear and plain equals to anyone whom they share a stage with. Nor even just those examples of drummer-plus such as Levon Helm or Gary Husband, for whom drumming is just a part of their all-round musicianship, and hence nourishes (and is nourished by) everything else they strum, press, blow or sing.

Here and now, I’m talking about the drummers who get so involved with the idea of pure sound in itself that they down sticks (in some cases permanently), and sail away to pursue it. Mick Harris, for example, who quit Napalm Death and thrash metal in order to explore deep industrial noise and beatless drones with Scorn and Lull. Drummers’ projects in this vein don’t seem to have the half-hearted taint of similar work by guitarists or keyboard players. Maybe the physical immediacy of drumming, from big bangs to stroked whispers, breed a special restraint and particular listening skills – a sensitivity to how air moves and responds to touch.

Within Houston’s underground music scene, Lance Higdon is best known for driving various math rock, improvisation, noisecore and psychedelic projects via superb kit-work. With Soaring on Their Pinions, his musical imagination moves him away from the drums – though probably not permanently. As Harris did in his ‘Murder Ballads’ collaboration with Martyn Bates, Higdon has turned to reworking traditional folk and liturgical songs via beatless ambient electronics. Where his method differs is that his electronics are, in effect, inaudible. Unlike the dark, low wind-noise of Harris’ machines, Higdon’s can only be detected by the imprints and embossing which they leave in other sounds. Specifically, he’s sifting and sampling the unaccompanied singing voices of women, getting deep into the grain in search of textures and fragments which he can then build back to the song. In some ways, it’s a nod back to the 1950s and the electro-acoustic methods of musique concrete, but it has a particular purity. No other sound sources – just the singing and what can be teased out of it.

At the heart of this debut single is the first of his guests-cum-raw-material – Atlantan mezzo-soprano Whitney Drury. She sings the Advent hymn ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’. The original Latin title is kept, but the sung words are English. Drury’s delivery is sung straight and beautifully, with a lone candle-flame clarity. It’s also thoroughly American, with a creamy Southern curve to her “r”s. and “o”s. Is that relevant? Perhaps – if you consider that Soaring on Their Pinions is about layering, and that even before Higdon begins his own work on this particular song he is dealing with a long tradition of accretion.

As a song, ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ can look back over a thousand years of travel: from Hebrew and Latin antiphon through Franciscan hymn to the muscular piety of Victorian Anglicans. Anyone taking it on is joining a lengthy queue of interpretations. A Christian favourite, the song has almost become a cliché, with everyone getting in on the act: robed Episcopalians, clean-shaven New Agers with check shirts and acoustic guitars, even Whitney Houston (who gospelled up a version with Take 6 in 2003). It’s hardly less popular to secular ears, sparking (or surviving) multiple interpretations even recently (by Enya, North Sea Radio Orchestra and even metalcore heroes August Burns Red).

Perhaps mindful of this, Higdon’s treatment doesn’t make any attempt to dig into or smooth over tradition. Instead he rediscovers the song from the base level of Drury’s vocal. The latter may start off clean and polished and contemporary (like air-conditioning and throat-care capsules). Yet as Higdon shaves, clones and reattaches fragments from it, he shapes and reveals something more ancient: something which could have wafted from a lonely hermit’s cell. He buoys the vocal up on cellular flutters of transposed echo – first arresting it, later turning it into a kind of slipped, arrested madrigal. He enshrines it in a subtle crypt of reverb. He steals and multiplies Drury’s sibilants, feeding them back past her in fuzzy air-serpents of susurration. Later on, distorted shreds of voice, crushed beyond recognition, waft through the song like smuts: while higher shreds tap out a shattered, stuttering Morse.

Yet ultimately Higdon’s a gatherer, not a harrower – respecting the song and the singer even as he refracts it. Such is the serene melodic beauty of the original that it’s easy to miss that it’s actually a desperate prayer for deliverance: a call for a Messiah to revitalise law, to destroy tyranny and captivity, to open up Heaven. In other words, it’s a spiritual protest song… or just a spiritual. Higdon’s treatment returns it to that level, while rendering it vulnerable to collapse or corruption. His sound-sculpting surrounds that beauty with loneliness, threat and uncertainty (via loop hazard and eeriness) while retaining its core of beleaguered faith.

Soaring on Their Pinions (featuring Whitney Drury): ‘Veni, Veni, Emmanuel’
self-released (no catalogue number or barcode)
Download-only single
Released: 20th December 2010

Get it from:
Free download from Bandcamp

Soaring on Their Pinions (Lance Higdon) online:
Facebook, Bandcamp

Tags: Houston, intimations of ancientness, Lance Higdon, listening to women, Soaring On Their Pinions, Whitney Drury

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Categories 2010, 21st century classical music, a capella, ambient music, church music, classical (Western art music), electronic, electronica, experimental music, loop music, music downloads for free/cheap/pay-what-you-like, musique concrete, reviews, sacred music, single & track reviews, vocal music

March 2004 – album reviews – Edwige’s ‘Rise and Sing’ (“while she’s not yet citing chapter and verse, the sacred aspect is clearer now”)

22 Mar

Edwige: ‘Rise And Sing’

Having made her initial mark with a couple of quirky, tricky-to-pigeonhole folk-pop albums, Edwige has made one on which she intends to celebrate “God’s beautiful gift of singing.” This could mean a lot of things. Perhaps she’s taking that unorthodox, archly beautiful voice of hers on an exploration of experimental a-capella songs, or a pure set of vocal rounds. Perhaps she’s made an album of devotional folk; or an unexpected gospel record.

As it happens, none of these are exactly the case. Edwige’s embrace of the joy of singing may be heartfelt, but it’s also comfortable. The key tone of ‘Rise and Sing’ is relaxation, and of Edwige’s assurance in her own work and her own methods. In many respects, it remains a familiar Edwige album. Many familiar tastes certainly remain intact. She still favours upfront lyrical messages, and continues to steer a course placing her somewhere between cabaret entertainer (especially on the oompah-pop of Bad Hair Day) and announcing angel.

She’s also continuing to develop her tendencies towards baroque pop arrangements. I Just Can’t Resist That Love is given lift by a suspended chorus of trilling voices and sunny passages of oboe; Into View is threaded with reeds, harpsichord, and tuba; while a harp adds sparkle to the simple, open love song After The Rain. The perky swing of New Mexico – with its elasticated guitars and psychedelic pedal-steel keyboards in tow – shows another side of her tastes, this time a dash of country music for the road.

The most surprising aspect of ‘Rise And Sing’ is a new affection for noisy guitar pop. Edwige’s latest producer (former Homer/Robyn Hitchcock sideman Andrew Claridge) sploshes some crashing electric guitars around several songs here, beefing up the acoustic strumming with touches of indie-pop, swamp-rock and grunge. The unplugged directness of previous Edwige albums, with their ornate bursts of cuteness and their denser musical surprises, sounded as if they’d come from odd-shaped rooms in an apartment piled high with spiritual books and knick-knacks. This album suggests that Edwige has recently knocked through a wall or two, and built a nice scruffy garage to play in. Her voice, as ever, is peppered with odd pitch-swoops, vibrato and declamatory theatrical inflections, and is still French-accented even after years of living in London. It’s an odd match for this bristly rock clanging – yet she thrives on the cruder energy that the extra noise provides.

With her perpetual good humour intact, Edwige uses the extra force to help her to drive home a few righteous stilettos. Straddling a catchy swaggering hook on Ears On Fire, she takes dry pot-shots at questionable cults with unreliable gurus – “I heard he was unfaithful to his wife, / I promptly took his words, and boiled them with my rice.” On Elegy For You, she skewers another bad-news, would-be Mephistopheles, decorating her lines with layered falsetto shimmers of vocalese while using the main lyric to sketch his cunning in song – “You’re so good at enchanting – / you lure with hopes and dreams / held through your spindly fingers, / and have them crushed like a crumply paper ball.” She also draws on this energy on Time For The Glorious: switching between midvoice and falsetto, rising serenely over the fuzzy rock backing to declaim “the leaf wouldn’t be but for the tree, / the wave wouldn’t roll but for the sea, / your heart wouldn’t be / but for a love much greater than one can ever conceive.”

Ah, yes. There are God-songs on ‘Rise and Sing’. Previously Edwige has only alluded to her personal, devotional brand of Christianity through cryptic clues, but now she’s beginning to become more direct. While she’s not yet citing chapter and verse, or names, the sacred aspect is clearer now, and this in turn reveals the true nature of many of her previous songs. As for the new ones, I Just Can’t Resist That Love pulls off the old soul-music trick of blurring across the boundaries of love song and devotional hymn. Opting for generosity rather than hectoring, Edwige’s revealed evangelism takes a variety of forms over a broad range of experience and musical method.

We get our gospel song after all – I May Have, in which Edwige testifies doubts and faith over a soft bed of electric chapel organ and little electric guitar agreements. Behind the pretty arrangement, Into View reveals itself as a waltzing tale of a Damascene conversion. For the jazz-tinged acoustica of Tea Light Sympathy Edwige turns teacher, with a gentle (but stern) offer to share her path. On Fusion, she becomes an ecstatic celebrant, kicking off a startling, delirious cocktail of techno pulse, hard-rocking fuzzpunk and hoedown. Choppy cello and guitars meet up with a stomping dance-floor beat and speaker-trashing bassline, and are in turn covered in festoons of Edwige as she chants, lets rip again with the vocalese and sends up fireworks of singing.

The thing about devotion, though, is that it involves letting go. Edwige is such a determined performer – so enthralled with the message, the observations, the little dialogues of life – that little of this (bar the rampaging delight of Fusion) rips through into the ecstatic. The message is always already decided, never discovered, and so the sense of actual revelation is lost. That’s a shame – for believer and unbeliever alike, observing or sharing a revelation of faith is often a fuse for crucial sympathy, and on her songs Edwige seems to miss out on this transformatory moment.

There’s one significant exception, in which Edwige’s wayward journey takes her up into a place she’s never visited before in song. Do I is that music-of-the-moment that’s missing elsewhere. An unexpected (and welcome) bit of psychedelic noise-folk, it’s set on Nico organ drones and on a cloudy screech of guitars so overdriven that they sound like English brass bands scattered by gales. The lyric is the simplest of declarations – no angles, no patter, just a naked, assured statement of devotion. “Do I come? – I do. / Will I follow? – I will. / In the light or darkness, pray for strength, / ah my love, … / Give me the warmth of your love. / Safe with you forever, ever, ever, ever.” Stepping up from the chapel drone, rising above this massing, crashing confusion of tangled feedback, Edwige is making her leap of faith for us; all cabaret cuteness falling away.

It’s the kind of inspiring moment which that unearthly voice was made for. I wish she’d do more like this.

Edwige: ‘Keep The Change’
Quasar Music, EDW3CD
CD album
Released: 2004

Buy it from:
Quasar Music or CD Baby.

Edwige online:

Tags: almost acoustic, Edwige, listening to women, little islands of belief, London (England), perky chirrup, sideways sparrow views, the text is important, travelling hopefully, women of heart and mind

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Categories 2004, album reviews, alternative folk, alternative pop, alternative rock, chamber pop, Christian music, devotional music, folk music, pop, psychedelic pop, reviews, singer-songwriter

July 2003 – album reviews – Edwige’s ‘You Show Them the Moon and They Look At Your Finger’ reissue (“opera singer, cat purr, wise seductress, vocal trapeze”)

27 Jul

Edwige: ‘You Show Them The Moon And They Look At Your Finger’

I seem to remember that that title is a Chinese proverb about fools missing the point: presumably this is a warning that Edwige is pointing to somewhere interesting, and that if you pay too much attention to the way she does it then you’ll miss the why. Certainly you can get sidetracked by trying to pigeonhole her music. Like any city-smart pigeon, it struggles and flits away from capture.

So what is this? It’s folky, but with at least one eye trained above the treetops. It’s French but it isn’t (despite the accent and the chanson/cabaret flutter, Edwige is London-based and Anglophone, aligned to the world in general, and open to angels). It’s poppy, but salted with the ascerbic willpower of a woman who’s lived long enough to have her own individual way of doing things. And while she’ll welcome fellow travellers, she’s confident enough not to be too worried about whether you go along with it or not. I think I like that.

It brings back a memory, too. When I was about fourteen, one of the key albums for my raging, hormonal inner life was Kate Bush’s ‘Never For Ever’. I used to have an odd relationship with that record. I’d play it all the time, never sure whether I actually wanted to or not. I remember it felt like a wayward friend on a perpetual mood swing: it was poised on a wobbly adolescent axis of feyness, promise and wisdom, and put me through bouts of frustration and love. How could one album zoom so unpredictably between cutesy kiddie fairy tales and vaginal vamping, between stardust fantasy and nuke-generation fears, vengefulness and nurture? And how could it tangle them all up in such a wayward, compelling way, but still make me want to smack the naivety out of it? No wonder I eventually ended up shoving it in the cupboard and heading for the more straightforward push and bump of indie-pop to soundtrack my later teens.

Many years of The Smiths, The Fall and My Bloody Valentine later, ‘You Show Them The Moon…’ reminds me of that early shamanic Kate Bush girl-pop. It’s not just because those arch, slanting vocals constantly recall ‘Never For Ever’s Coffee Homeground; or because I Am A Temple, from its Nile guitar twang to its waft of desert synth and the aerial-bending vocals, is a ringer for the storybook mystique Bush brought into play on Egypt. OK, Edwige’s music doesn’t carry the same weight of sensual bewitchment. It betrays its budget origins via keyboards that sometimes dip into tweeness and rinky-dink; and by a no-frills recording that sonically cramps her cosmic-tinged imaginings, cramming the cornucopia into a garden shed. But ‘You Show Them The Moon…’ does show the same fascination with the free-flowing mind that’s one of hippydom’s more useful legacies, and it can carry its eccentricity convincingly as well.

A lot of this is to do with Edwige’s voice: a wonderful, peculiar, obliquely beautiful thing. It curves itself round the tones of opera singer, cat purr, wise seductress, vocal trapeze… all with glass-etching clarity and weird ricochets. It’s like a combination of Liz Fraser from Cocteau Twins and a French Eddi Reader without the gawkiness or the broadsheet approval. Actually, don’t stop there: look towards the Strange And Flamboyant Women In Pop section. In spite of the two-dimensional production, Edwige also pulls off the trick of sounding a bit like Bjork’s long-lost boho auntie. She doesn’t possess Bjork’s genius spark of child-vision, or her way with a contemporary sound (it’s French cafe culture round here, not club culture: you’ll find no beats, samples or Trickies). But she does have that same bungee-elastic vocal yaw – admittedly delivered with Edith Piaf’s brand of declamation, and with the sort of melodies and poised guitar strums that go with ten-foot silk scarfs swirled round swan-necks.

The songs themselves fizz just on the right side of easy listening. They’re frequently soft and fluffy, but with deceptive bends. Each is a moment, polished and expansively lit, in a life that’s become a quest in which there’s no goal but an understanding – an ordinary life illuminated by extraordinary lights. Downtrodden and downbeat on No Shape For Love, Edwige can be revived enough to put on a spiritual throb of benediction for Be Blessed. She’ll caress you with a dedication of warm, supportive love on Serve You Well. She’ll also slap you down with a moment’s notice, scolding and instructing in slightly fractured English. “If I open up my heart, it’s not to please your fantasy… / You think you are my king, you’re just a slave of your own enemy.”

Throughout the album, Edwige slings assorted moods and styles around herself like hula-hoops, keeping a core of determination but remaining free-floating. She will go all Jane Siberry and produce fluffy-edged clouds of electric guitar for The Dearest – a fragile love song where the unselfconscious fairytale imagery teases out a winning pathos. If pushed, she’ll become flamboyant, defiant and unreachable, as she is on I Am A Temple (“don’t you dare pry into my life!”). Yet she’s happy – on If You Were The One – to suddenly ditch the eerie and mystical to trill away on the kind of cosy tap-dancing tearoom jazz that you’d have thought long-lost on 1950s lounge records, or to toss out a dash of Celtic sounds with ‘The Omen’ (Clannad harps and tricky jig-in-a-box/jump-into-the-sea rhythms).

Back in 1999, the original version of this album was also noisier. Edwige occasionally dabbled in a kind of accidental techno, or flew in some famished rock guitars to add roar. For this 2003 reissue, she’s ditched these particular quirks and re-recorded a couple of songs as acoustic versions. Something’s lost when Tune Up All Your Violins has its bull-in-a-china-shop clatter removed, but Edwige, strumming away solo and singing forcefully, still uses it to plunge through cosmic arcana like a costumed hero on her own cryptic spiritual mission. They Won’t Make Me Nervous is shorn of its crashing electric guitars and bendy orchestral fogs of synth, but keeps everything else, including the super-soaring choruses on which Edwige zips and kinks like a skidding comet.

The two songs at each end of the album unfurl Edwige’s searching musical and spiritual ambitions to the full, the instruments coming alive out of their budget politeness and warming the air. To Discover lounges in rich, luxurious music – lazy acoustic guitars, damask curtains of synth – but Edwige’s voice cuts through the slumber like a little silver knife. In the middle of comfort (“thinking love is here forever to remain… / and life has no more to offer than what you already knew”) there are breakdowns and hard lessons ahead: “you still have to discover.” And the climatic grandeur of Stillness suggests that she’s reached some sort of peace, looking back over the terrain of the life-quest with a sympathetic eye.

“You need to be loved, and you need to be told, but there’s no reassurance… / You feed yourself with books and beliefs / and stick on your windshield / pictures and maps / so you won’t see your direction… / And try to get peace rearranging confusion… / Still looking for Eden, El Dorado, still looking for a search / when in the stillness…is home.”

Then The Voice shoots up to ecstatic heights, hits the stars, ignites them in a wave of flame, and sees out the album with an ascending, aspirant note. Edwige is smiling and pirouetting somewhere on the pavement where Parisian cafe music (accordions and sparklers) meets the sussed cosmic chick (tarot, tai-chi and her own flat). Someone get her a decent producer and the space to fling a few more scarves around, and she’ll take us off to a brighter night, where a giant moon is untroubled by idiots pointing and where cats somersault over the chimney pots.

Edwige: ‘You Show Them The Moon And They Look At Your Finger’
Quasar Music, EDW1CD/KCA (634479459061)
CD/cassette/download album
Released: 2003 (originally released 1996)

Buy it from:
Quasar Music or CD Baby.

Edwige online:

Tags: almost acoustic, Edwige, listening to women, little islands of belief, London (England), perky chirrup, sideways sparrow views, women of heart and mind

Comments 2 Comments
Categories 2003, album reviews, alternative folk, alternative pop, chamber pop, devotional music, folk music, pop, psychedelic pop, reviews, singer-songwriter

September 1999 – album reviews – Edwige’s ‘Keep the Change’ (“nebulous, pine-forest cleanliness”)

30 Sep

Edwige: ‘Keep The Change’

Edwige is a true original and determined with it, outspoken in her contemplative pantheism and in reaching towards the divine spirit that binds her universe together. It’s difficult to pin her down to any songwriter school – even within the eccentric fringes of spiritual folk, French chamber-chanson and psychedelic New Age she seems to incline to, she’s an odd customer and obviously wants it no other way.

You’ll either love or hate her unorthodox and uneasily captivating voice as it zooms and dodges (like a brilliantly coloured, elusive dragonfly) over her baroque and mystical songs. It’s more unpredictable now than ever – zigzagging through melodies, it’s never quite where you expect it to be. She’ll carol, coo, stick you with a sharp note. She’ll shiver herself into blocks of eerie harmonies flickering between celestial and dischordant. She’ll double back on herself, frustrate you, salve you; and finally dissolve into a lovely swarm of voice-clouds.

The voice remains the same, but the music has moved on since her jaunty, budget-recorded debut album. Faithful keyboardist Joe Evans is still on board, but admitting Alexander Zuchrow (guitarist, engineer and, most crucially, arranger) to the heart of the music means that Edwige’s songs have been framed and fleshed out in richer textures. Harpsichord and dream-pad sounds replace the previous tinny synth presets. Gentle bluesy guitars add new body; cellos, Appalachian fiddles and soft saxophones peep out of the corners. ‘Keep The Change’ possesses the nebulous, pine-forest cleanliness of Narada Records, or of Windham Hill folk.

If the first album was postcards from Edwige’s imagination, ‘Keep The Change’ brings you a breath of countryside as well as further maps of her spiritual landscape. Edwige’s themes of continuance and connection, of inner illumination and the dispelling of fear, sit in leaf-green settings. A puff of baby-Clannad folk in Water; tinkling Vivaldi pop for Reflection. The lyrics (and the rootsier atmospheres) are permeated by rain-mists and mermaids, wind and light. Via perky fiddles and banjo, the gracious Joy Song (both a letdown and a thank-you to a luckless admirer) threads country and Irish airs around Edwige’s serenity. The bizarre falsetto-waltz melody of No Two Ways bobs balloon-like over strings and harpsichord (which could’ve come from ‘Five Leaves Left’) and a clink of lounge vibraphone (which definitely didn’t).

Sometimes Edwige brushes up against the exquisite. On the contemplative ethereal anthem, Something Deep she mixes her “everywhere god” faith with a touch of Duke Ellington gospel shapes plus lemon-flavoured jazz cello. On He Only Knows (over yielding beds of keyboards, clarinets, luscious classical guitar ripples and soprano sax) she sings of journeying – “an arm coming from nowhere / far away has taken him. / Now he changes his road again,” – and then sets the seal on it with her own signature swim of voices. On I’m Out she sings of passing through peril to attain faith. A tapestry of Enya-esque chanting and the urgent wire-tang of a Jantsch-y folk guitar finally dissolves down into another magnificently luscious voicescape, though it basks a little too contentedly in the warmth of fuzzy piano and sax along the way.

Equally, sometimes she misses the mark. Her tendency to overbalance into tweeness is one thing (the popcorn cafe-jazz of Leave Your Mind At The Gate being the worst offender). It’s worse when the same determination that stretches Edwige’s songs towards dizzy heights sometimes leads her to stretch them out of shape. Eager to illustrate, she pushes too hard, letting her lyrics crowd out the melody and garble the song. At such times, she bustles against the delicate arrangements instead of nestling in them. For example, amongst the chirruping violins and Spanish guitars of So They Say, her message of opting for instinct (over demands for hard facts, or superstitions) is smothered by the tangled, forced and fussy words.

It’s all far better when Edwige relinquishes the strict and portentous hippy lectures and just lets her songs breathe; when she stops banging against aspirational truths and taps into the grace she sings about. This happens on Wherever It Is (a sparkling ballad of devotion) and on Light Energy Love, where a sweet, open melody (reminiscent of Bryan Maclean’s gossamer hums on Love’s ‘Forever Changes’) merges with a champagne tingle of fiddles, guitars and harmoniums and with Zuchrow’s gently gurgling psychedelic streams. It’s in songs like this that her determination pays off and her quest progresses.

On the final song, Something Deep, she sings with an equal measure of frustration, patience and commitment. “You keep plugging your ears so you won’t hear my song… / Something deep inside of me knows / I still sing for you.” Going down fighting, or transcending closed minds? The little soul warrior with the effervescing voice isn’t going to give up.

Edwige: ‘Keep The Change’
Quasar Music, EDW2CD (634479464935)
CD/download/cassette album
Released: 1999

Buy it from:
Quasar Music or CD Baby.

Edwige online:

Tags: almost acoustic, Edwige, listening to women, little islands of belief, London (England), perky chirrup, sideways sparrow views, songs that sound like summer, women of heart and mind

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 1999, album reviews, alternative folk, alternative pop, chamber pop, devotional music, folk music, pop, psychedelic pop, reviews, singer-songwriter

September 1997 – album reviews – John Law’s ‘The Hours’ (“a vision of a musician dissecting an act of faith for its structure alone”)

29 Sep

John Law: ‘The Hours’

“This music is dedicated to the spirit that moved the first humans to speak the unspeakable, and thus to sing”. Thus spake John Law, improvising pianist and British free-scene eminence gris. And the audience did open their ears, with a subtle flip of their hopeful hearts, and did prepare to receive his wisdom.

As Law explains in the liner notes, this is the third of a trio of recordings for which he’s written piano music in the form of plainchant. On this occasion, inspired by the ‘Liber Usualis’ devotional prayer-chants of Benedictine monks, he’s adapted and extrapolated a set of vocal melodies to correspond with the eight hours of prayer the monks observe. So, in effect, he’s set himself the task of portraying a whole community’s profoundest expression in music. Moreover, a community who’ve secluded themselves from the world specifically to perform that expression. Tall order.

‘The Hours’ is split into two eight-section parts. Firstly, an exposition of eight “chants”, all but one under a minute in length, each a single melody line or parallel harmony with minimal chordal support. Secondly, ‘The Hours’ proper: eight extrapolations of the preceding chants in which Law’s freed up to add his own interpretations and textures. So for the first half, we get a lone piano in the middle distance playing (with heavy use of the muting pedal) dutifully uninflected melodies with all the emotion of a canning plant: the beauty of the lines frosted over, clean as an abandoned cloister. For the second, the piano’s intended to take on a life of its own, expounding off the original melodies.

In the first of the improvising pieces, Matins/Vigilae, this doesn’t amount to much more besides the odd syncopated jazz twitch, surprisingly crass after the sterile beauty of the naked themes. For the superior Lauds it’s the decoration of the theme of Chant II by a sprinkle of high treble notes from the top of the piano, a subtly emotive sea-swell of tenor phrasing from below. For Prime, a Keith Jarrett-y stroll during which Law transmutes Chant III into a whirling spiral of shifting arpeggios that tumble somewhere between György Ligeti and Allan Holdsworth. Terce (one of the most successful pieces) staggers echoes of Chant IV – vibraphone-like – with occasional flashes of beauty when Law lets his guard down: then moves into peculiar John Cage mutes as he interferes with the strings in the piano frame, letting buzzes and flutters distort with the fluttering trills.

The problems really start to arise after this, when Sext’s boogie-woogie serialism (which moves into more of those acrobatic arpeggios) sounds a little too comical to take seriously, and the stomp of Nones has taken the feel so far from the original source that you’ll have forgotten you began this recording ostensibly listening to chants in an abbey. Vespers turns its own source, inexplicably, into stammered staccato pseudo-stride piano with spurts of hammering, constrained exploration. None of which would matter were it not for Law’s efforts in the liner notes to link his music to the devotional, whereas what he’s actually done is link it to the architectural. Like it or not, plainchant ain’t gospel, and its beauty doesn’t survive the transition into jazz unless – as Jan Garbarek proved with the Hilliard Ensemble on ‘Officium’ – you allow the jazz to meet it on its own territory and terms.

Compline makes some belated amends by being a gentle Bill Evans-style study of the final chant, but it’s the necessary little coming far too late. ‘The Hours’ is just too academic, too dryly sophisticated, too damn measured in its intent to take to heart. Law’s sophisticated, he avoids corniness, he has discipline. Oh God, does he have discipline. That, in itself, is what sinks this fine but soulless recording. Finally, for all the concentration, seriousness and cleverness of ‘The Hours’ it leaves you with no vision of God, no vision even of devotion; just a vision of a musician dissecting an act of faith for its structure alone. What it also leave you with is the impression that John Law – rather like the monks he’s allegedly saluting with this music – should really get out more often.

John Law: ‘The Hours’
Future Music Records, FMR CD41-V0697 (7 86497 26352 3)
CD-only album
Released: September 1997
Get it from: (2020 update) Cornucopia Recordings.
John Law online:

Tags: John Law, piano music

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 1997, acoustic music, album reviews, ceremonial music, chamber music, Christian music, church music, cover versions, devotional music, Early Music, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, reviews, sacred music

March 1997 – album reviews – Jocelyn Pook’s ‘Deluge’ (“a suite of stunning invention and sheer beauty”)

1 Mar

Jocelyn Pook: ‘Deluge’

The elegant grace of tragedy is often linked with the splat of farce. This album’s major selling point (on some copies of the CD, it’s trumpeted by a sticker ‑ I kid you not) is that it features the music from last year’s TV ads for Orange mobile phones, namely Jocelyn Pook’s setting of “Blow The Wind Southerly” sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

Sigh. It’s sad but true that increasingly weird and wonderful music is getting picked up and co‑opted by advertising agencies for their campaigns. Your average ‘Coronation Street’ ad‑break may currently play to a soundtrack of Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Aphex Twin, U‑Ziq, Cocteau Twins… and Pook. They’re selling their souls for the filthy lucre from red‑braced ad execs. Of course they are: rampant fucking capitalism is bringing us the best that post‑modern music has to offer. It’s art selling out!

But… Mr or Ms Normal Music Fan are going into Our Price and humming this music over the counter to Shop Assistant. Consequently, they’re getting turned on to (at least relatively) experimental music, er, man… And as Jocelyn Pook joins the hideous capitalist gravy train (look, I’m not being cruel: my tongue is in my cheek) from obscurity to the CD racks, the musos among us will smugly tell that Pook is widely known as the leader of the Electra Strings (along with Caroline Lavelle, Sonia Slaney and others), who have no doubt been rushed off their feet in the past couple of years as every British pop act decided they must show their serious side by having at least one strings‑based track in their repertoire (I think we call it “hiring in a touch of class”).

But here ‑ ably backed by the Electras, knife‑edged art‑scene soprano Melanie Pappenheim and a pocketful of exotic musicians and sounds ‑ Jocelyn Pook shows herself as being beyond simply a viola player. She’s a composer of emotion and invention and, in the best traditions of post‑modernism, introduces classical and traditional musics to the brave new world of samples and electronics. OK, so it has to be admitted that Dead Can Dance are an immediate and convenient comparison, but ‘Deluge’ is warmer, more emotional: less monumentally impressive, perhaps, but also nowhere near as harsh and Wagnerian.

The twelve tracks of ‘Deluge’ (germinating from a clutch of “post‑modern hymns” written for a Canadian dance‑theatre project) are best appreciated as one pre‑millennial suite with recurring themes (the emotions drawn from the year 1000, the methodology from 2000). Requiem Aeternam, like many elements of the other tracks, opens the album with solo and multitracked singing of a traditional requiem over one sustained root note. Post‑modern chamber plainsong, in other words, founded upon a sense of inevitability that’s unchanged by the impact of technology.

Technology, in fact, might even be hastening that grand inevitable. Oppenheimer is undoubtedly one of the central parts of ‘Deluge’. It opens with a disturbing sample of Robert Oppenheimer talking (he seems heavy with emotion, a man with the weight of his discovery of nuclear destruction bearing down upon him) surrounded by a foreboding nuclear wind: this merges into the poignant but more hopeful sound of the Jewish call to prayer and a dawn chorus of birds. As the central sung theme from the first track returns with a supporting string section, a haunting, heartbreaking elegy is created.

For Oppenheimer himself, this could be the emotions created by his dread and foresight at what he had created. More powerfully, however, this piece stands as a requiem for a world forever changed by the knowledge of possible nuclear annihilation. A post‑Cold War planet we may now be, but his music took me right back to the nervousness of the mid‑’80s and its accompanying, tangible dread of nuclear war.

Lightening the mood and returning to the music, Blow The Wind (subtitled Pie Jesu) does indeed feature that Orange ad music again. Heard without those connotations, however, this is a brilliant interweaving of samples and live sound, as Kathleen Ferrier’s familiar rendition of the traditional vocal is interspersed with Pappenheim and Pook’s plangent vocal counterpoint, the echoing sounds of children playing, and more soaring strings. As in hip‑hop, the form that originally used sampling to such great effect and historic importance, the sample of Ferrier is used as a basis to build other musical sequences, instrumentation and vocals. It’s humble, beautiful, and ends far too soon.

The lessons in the new technology of music Jocelyn Pook has gained will undoubtedly further influence the writing and performance of her music for her own instrument ‑ strings. The penultimate piece, La Blanche Traversée, appears to be a fairly standard chamber‑piece setting of words by Racine, but more remarkable is the subtle instrumental backing. Pook and the Electra Strings play a slightly off‑rhythm pattern of oscillating notes that, to any DJ or mixer who knows his decks, would be regarded as a loop. I feel that it is safe to assume that the original hip‑hop DJs never had this development in mind when they crafted scratching and looping. ‘Deluge’ is a long way from being electronica, but the ’90s cross‑pollination continues.

While music has broken all the boundaries of genre in the ’90s, the end products have resulted in albums of naked emotion or sonic inventiveness. But rarely both together. ‘Deluge’ is a suite of stunning invention and sheer beauty in its music, but with all the necessary emotion of a requiem for the post‑nuclear age. The wind blows cold, with the sound of ravens on the air, but it tugs your whole life right to the surface of your skin.

Never mind the politics of how you got to hear of Jocelyn Pook or ‘Deluge’. Open your mind to it.

(review by Vaughan Simons)

Jocelyn Pook: ‘Deluge’
Virgin Records, CDVE 933 7243 (7 24384 29632 2)
CD-only album
Released: 24th February 1997

Get it from:
(2018 update) long out-of-print, so best picked up second-hand. Most of the tracks on ‘Deluge’ were remixed and reissued on the ‘Flood’ album in 1999.

Jocelyn Pook online:

Tags: Caroline Lavelle, Electra Strings, Jean Racine, Jocelyn Pook, Kathleen Ferrier, Melanie Pappenheim, Robert Oppenheimer, Sonia Slaney, Vaughan Simons

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Misfit City

August/September 2015 – an American summer/fall tour for The Collection and Lowland Hum

July 2015 – upcoming London gigs this week – LUME on Thursday (Nick Costley-White/Bleep Test); Daylight Music on Saturday (The UCC Handbell Ringers/Ryan Teague/Ellie Lovegrove, with Angèle David-Guillou)

December 2010 – single & track reviews – Soaring on Their Pinions’ ‘Veni, Veni, Emmanuel’ (featuring Whitney Drury)(“just the singing and what can be teased out of it”)

March 2004 – album reviews – Edwige’s ‘Rise and Sing’ (“while she’s not yet citing chapter and verse, the sacred aspect is clearer now”)

July 2003 – album reviews – Edwige’s ‘You Show Them the Moon and They Look At Your Finger’ reissue (“opera singer, cat purr, wise seductress, vocal trapeze”)

September 1999 – album reviews – Edwige’s ‘Keep the Change’ (“nebulous, pine-forest cleanliness”)

September 1997 – album reviews – John Law’s ‘The Hours’ (“a vision of a musician dissecting an act of faith for its structure alone”)

March 1997 – album reviews – Jocelyn Pook’s ‘Deluge’ (“a suite of stunning invention and sheer beauty”)

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