Glissando – The World Without Us (Vinyl)

Heavy-weight wax that includes download code and sexy looking prints…

It’s been four long years since Glissando released the critically acclaimed ‘With Our Arms Wide Open We March Towards the Burning Sea’ and the duo finally return this November with a new record ‘The World Without Us’.

The new material bares Glissando’s trademark of ethereal voices and tip-toing piano melodies but the overall sound is richer and more expansive. Epic swells of strings and guitars sore above the drones and field recordings to create an intense yet fragile noise. The dynamics of the new record are also apparent and through the use of an array of guests there is a new depth and ambition to Glissando that portrays the songs in their truest form. ‘The World Without Us’ moves slowly between dark shadows and into more hopeful territory throughout, it’s not afraid to be silent when the moment arrives but it’s also capable of enormous, echoing, choral and string crescendoes in one subtle movement.

Since Glissando’s debut in 2008 Elly May Irving and Richard Knox have experimented with countless different live set-ups and members ranging from simple, more immediate shows as a duo through to a 7-piece group. Never tied to a specific ideal of how to play the material, it enabled the group to tour heavily for a couple of years in the UK and Europe whilst recording a follow-up album but inevitably this process took it toll. Knox began new projects; ‘The Rustle of the Stars’ (with Frederic D. Oberland of FareWell Poetry) and later A-Sun Amissa (which also features regular Glissando member Angela Chan) which weighed heavily on the amount of studio time he could commit to Glissando.