CD

Gareth Dickson is ghostlike. From the dark outskirts of Glasgow he has sent three studio studio albums in to the world - Collected Recordings (2009), The Dance (2010) and Quite A Way Away (2012). These albums have bewitched a growing inner circle, including some of the most innovative musicians around today - Juana Molina and Vashti Bunyan to name just two. Gareth has been the only constant member of Vashti’s touring outfit over the past ten years and latterly they have stripped down to a duet on their worldwide travels. Vashti indeed makes a spectral apparition on the first track of Gareth’s new album Orwell Court. Gareth Dickson’s music is both beautiful and dark. A quiet Scottish melancholy underpinned by a grace and ethereal purity paired with a unique impression where the delicacy of Nick Drake mixes with the openness and space Brian Eno. Gareth’s music is often stripped down to the spare elements of voice and acoustic guitar, but a complex and mysterious music hides beneath the surface, demanding but generous and surprising. Clearly picking up where his previous albums left off, Gareth throws in a few surprises. Gleaned from his time spent touring and experimenting between albums the addition of a drum kit, some keyboards and guest vocalists enrich the palette. But fear not, these elements, while previously unheard of in his music, are approached with the subtlety that his listeners expect. They are a texture that adds dimension throughout the album. The hush is still there in its most genuine form.

Start with a room, a cleanish one, not too rustic, not too slick, and then fill it with tools, fill it with anything that can be used to make other things. Put the room in the forest, but not too deeply in, let’s have the city on the distant horizon. Then, let’s have two craftsman, artists, explorers. Tell them a bit about where the room is, but not exactly. Make them find it, together. When they finally do they will embark on their creations, but it won’t be the immerse-and-shut-yourself-off-from-the-world type of creation. To them, creation involves talking, travelling, experiencing, not just working. They are Illuha and this hints at how they operate. They are true musicians and artisans with a slew of talents that become all twisted and morphed when combined. On their 2011 debut, Shizuku, their room was a century-old church in Washington state and their tools; whatever instruments they could haul over from Japan and the pianos they were lucky enough to find inside. As creators they have an obsessive attention to detail but also know that the strength of creation doesn’t always lie merely in the act itself. Illuha knows the power of communication.

In the Lens, Solo Andata’s fourth full-length album, was born from recordings found in the interstices of decades-old hard drives, lost email threads from disused accounts, and forgotten samples recorded on cassette dictaphones. These fragments were combined and re-worked with newer elements to create an album very much in the spirit of the band’s debut Fyris Swan (Hefty Records, 2006), an album touched by both folk and jazz and swathed in a dusty, narcotic haze. Solo Andata’s Kane Ikin and Paul Fiocco have always pushed aside the digital studio in favor of a more haphazard and hands-on workshop vibe to their productions. They prefer near-broken acoustic instruments, cheap microphones and, as can be witnessed by their live performances, tend to turn anything they can get their hands on into a beautiful sound-making object.

The instrumentation on Twine is simple - electric piano, bells, stringed instruments... With careful and deliberate physical manipulations the sounds is subtlely abstracted, as can be heard on “Buoy,” where the tape machine mechanics themselves join in the recording to create a piece suggestive of the abandoned dock the two photographed in Iceland a couple of years earlier as it quietly knocked against the cold winter shore. Imagery like this abounds through the tracks. Slow, haunting melodies under a layer of warm tape hiss and accidental physical sounds give the listener plenty of room for imagination, reflection and the stirring up of lost memories. The intimacy of the tape loops combined with the lonliness of the sounds gives Twine a complexity beyond its simple form. Deupree and Fischer have created a intensely focused new work that draws upon all of their creative interactions since their 2010 debut.