Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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It occurred to me today that modular synthesizer albums are a lot like rodeos: it is immediately clear which cowboys are bad at riding broncos and which ones are good, but it is very rare for any of their individual personalities to come through while they are trying not to get bucked.  Despite only recently taking the plunge into modular synthesizer-centric composition with 2014’s Essays in Idleness, Bissonnette is one of the few artists able to transcend the limitations of that analogy.  While Pitch, Paper & Foil is not necessarily one of the best Christopher Bissonnette albums, it does boast a few of his best pieces and there is no question that this is a fruitful direction.  More importantly, Pitch still sounds unmistakably like Christopher Bissonnette, proving that the entropy of electronics is no match for Bissonnette's rigorous focus and control.
It is almost tragic that the opening "Epoch" is such an amazing piece, as it instantly raises expectations that the rest of the album cannot possibly match.  Of course, the trade-off is that I immediately wanted to hear the rest of the album in hopes of proving myself wrong.  In any case, "Epoch" is essentially the logical culmination of Bissonnette's career to date.  He was already an excellent composer and that has not changed.  Now, however, he has taken the lush and dreamlike ambient drone of his early work and used his self-built synthesizer to focus on making the textures and details as rich and vibrant as possible.  In "Epoch," Christopher forms a wonderfully buzzing and oscillating bed of dense drones, while the foreground is a beguiling haze of undulating shimmer and hiss; muted twinkling; and powerfully sizzling, crackling, and sputtering surges.  The balance between structure and unpredictability is perfect, as the piece feels like a massive mysterious presence slowly surfacing in a lovely, sun-dappled lake.  Happily, "Epoch" is not entirely a fluke either, as "The Rate of Delay" scales similar heights much later on the album, albeit in much more subdued fashion, allowing its warm, wobbly thrum and gently breaking analog electronic waves to just drift and ripple along in a beautifully languorous simmer.
The remainder of the album, however, is considerably less engaging, as Bissonnette is a bit less ambitious in his vision.  Speaking charitably, I might say that Pitch, Paper, and Foil is "varied," but it is hard not to be disappointed by a pleasant interlude of amiably twinkling and bubbling analog electronics when I have already experienced a dazzling, immersive, and fully realized soundworld.  For the most part, the other six pieces are basically the audio equivalent of a calm bay or an overgrown field on a breezy day: the scene is quite static in a larger sense, but there is a lot of soothing swaying and rippling happening on a smaller scale.  The execution remains impeccable, of course, but it is simply too gentle and fragile to leave much of an impression on me.
Of course, some pieces are still better than others.  "Keeping Guard," for example, maintains a strong sense of forward motion, an appealingly unpredictable pattern of deep bloops and trebly twinkling, and an escalating undercurrent with some muscle.  I also quite liked "Shuttering Slides," as its otherwise lazy reverie is beautifully embellished by a host of stuttering, fluttering, and undulating textures.  Unfortunately, other pieces like "Surcease," "Dualism," and "Textbooks of the Elite" are basically pastoral squiggles, twinkles, or drones that never fully manage to transcend early New Age territory ("Dualism" and "Surcease" would seem perfectly at home on I Am The Center).  Bissonnette departs from that benignly radiant template a little by leaving in scratches and hiss, but the grittier events on the periphery do nothing to add heft to the main themes.
I suspect that I would have liked Pitch, Paper & Foil a lot more if it had come out five years ago, which is unfortunate.  Or maybe it is wonderful (for me, anyway), as my tastes are considerably more sophisticated and discriminating now.  In any case, I am far too deadened by the constant onslaught of new modular synthesizer albums to enjoy anything that is merely pleasant and well-executed now.  Most of this album falls quite unambiguously into that category, making it a bit of a mixed-bag for me.  However, the good news is that both "Epoch" and "The Rate of Delay" managed to surpass my increasingly unreasonable and unfair standards for this type of fare.  In fact, they are easily two of my favorite Christopher Bissonnette pieces to date, so this recent synth-centric phase of Bissonnette’s career is a looking a lot like a fitfully triumphant creative renaissance.  As such, Pitch continues a very promising evolution, but the culmination of that evolution is not quite here yet.
In many ways, these two recent albums (one physical, one digital only) are the quintessential works from Will Long’s Celer guise. Both Akagi and Soryu are expansive, lengthy single piece works that at times are so hushed and delicate to almost be imperceptible, yet they remain compelling and beautiful from beginning to end.
Akagi especially seems to have been composed specifically in a way that tends to drift in and out of consciousness..The work was originally created to accompany a live yoga event in Japan, requiring music that would not just be understated and unobtrusive, but that could convey a meditative quality to it as well.The piece was based around two tape loops of synthesizers, with similar, yet at times contrasting structures that result in peaks and valleys of volume and intensity.
Akagi was obviously composed with the CD format in mind since it clocks in at mere seconds shy of 80 minutes, the accepted maximum for a disc.Additionally, it has such a quiet dynamic to it that the imperfections in most analog media would overshadow the music.The early portion of the piece is especially quiet, requiring attention to hear the most subtle of sounds that Long utilizes.When the music is the most prominent, it retains the distinctly Celer sound of haunting, but not sinister spirits captured in audio form.
When Long pulls the volume back, the result is an odd, delicate sound that is positively shimmering, a fragile sound that is so delicate it sounds as if it could break at any time.Eventually he blends in some dense, heavier yet still warm low-end passages that make for a more commanding sound, but one that never becomes too strong or overwhelming.The somewhat more forceful, attention-grabbing moments balance those relaxed, calm passages extremely effectively, so that even a work which is designed to sometimes fade into the background cannot fully be ignored.
Soryu in some ways feels like a demo or an early attempt at the strategies employed in Akagi.It has a similar structure, being a single, 63 minute piece that strays way from the drone heavy reputation that much of Celer’s work previously was based on.Instead of repetition it is vast expanses of tone and melody.Long again takes the piece from more commanding to near silent moments, like sunlight passing through the clouds, but it comparably has less focus.It is by no means a bad album, but in comparison to Akagi it lacks that delicate touch and conceptual strength.
Both Akagi and Soryu do act as a subtle variation on Long’s prolific work as Celer in that they are less pure drone oriented and have structures more akin to classical ambient work.While he works with a similar palette of lengthy, hushed tones and textural expanses, the pieces are less about repetition and more of a sense of vast structure and delicate composition.The quiet dynamics, especially on Akagi is at times so peaceful it could potentially lull me to sleep, but due to it achieving the goal he intended more than any sort of dullness.
Presence and absence is a musically black and white affair. Either an instrument is present or it isn’t. A sound is buried in the mix or it’s up front and unavoidable. A recording can be clear or murky, not both, and though there are degrees of difference, those degrees exist exclusively on the presence side of the scale. The Sodden Floor, released last year by Loren Chasse in an edition of 100 cassettes, introduces shades of grey to that dichotomy. Over four songs, Chasse combines vaporous field recordings—of pipes, running water, stones, and humming glass—with abstract and sometimes eerie instrumental performances, on bells, drums, guitar, and melodeon. The low-key, atmospheric result is like listening to someone else’s dream. There’s heat and texture to the sights and sounds, but they are implied more than felt, veiled and kept out of reach behind layers of steam and oxidized memories.
Memory is a good place to begin with The Sodden Floor. It was recorded in Portland, Oregon between 2011 and 2014, but the now sold out cassette (still available in digital format) wasn’t released until October of 2015, which means there was considerable distance between at least some of the recordings and the arrangement of the material. Furthermore, despite using multiple instruments, Chasse lists only his great grandmother’s melodeon in the liner notes, an instrument built in 1867 by, appropriately enough, Horace Waters & Co. Before the music begins, history, memory, and family are already a part of the proceedings.
Set the tape to spinning and those topics are all magnified, or diminished depending on how you look at it. Except for a few passages of melody played on a guitar and what might be a cello, everything Chasse presents, he presents from a distance. Sounds are pale or faded, soaked in a remote pallor that insinuates temperature and texture without actually transmitting either. It’s a music haunted by sounds and the things that made them, by wind and breath and slow movements through spaces lined with dirt and plant life. Bells, which Chasse utilizes prominently in a couple of sections, don’t simply resonate against a dead background, they ring out in a place that seems like it should smell of stone and wet earth. Solitary notes on the guitar drift by like clouds and the meandrous melodeon phrases bubble up and down as if carried by a stream. Just as they are about to solidify, just as it appears they are within arm’s reach, the momentum of the music—and the momentum of those strange environmental noises—carries them away and they recede into the fog.
Also included in the liners is a brief uncredited poem written like an ode to watery decay. The concluding couplet reads, "Cut all ropes to the shore/Leave me be upon this sodden floor." If Chasse envisioned The Sodden Floor as a final drifting out to sea, he halfway achieved it. Halfway because semblances of the shore are still in evidence. Some of the beauty and melancholy of the recording subsists in its transitory character and in the feeling that none of the events and objects captured on the tape can be recovered. They are as absent as they are present, part physical phenomenon and part phantom.
There is, however, room for endurance. The music is capable of seeping into the air and into our skin, and like family and friends, can persist through all manners of change. They survive as ghosts, present and absent in what we see and hear. But it may be that ghosts are just as real as that stone or that drum or that old melodeon, built by Horace Waters & Co. in 1867.
This latest release from LA's resident modular synth wizard continues Gengras's tradition of endless reinvention coupled with no small degree of tech-obsession.  Two Variations documents what are essentially three(!) variations of an elaborate and complex new patch that Gengras self-described as "two pairs of marimba mallets attached to a pair of dice."  While that might adequately summarize both the process and the degree of randomness involved, Two Variations still basically sounds exactly like a modular synthesizer album, albeit quite an inspired one, as these two extended pieces lie somewhere between sublime analog burbling and the antics of an especially unpredictable woodpecker.  Unfortunately, while the material is some of the strongest that Gengras has recorded in a while, Two Variations still feels more like a promising series of raw experiments than a definitive, perfected work in this new vein.
It is worth noting that, aside from the "marimba" comment, Gengras's own description of Two Variations involves an amusingly technical run-down of his set-up that will likely make little sense at all to anyone who is not already neck-deep in the world of modular synthesizers (the number of clock pulses it takes for a note to advance is modulated by random voltage from a Make Noise Wogglebug, for example).  On one hand, that is neat bit of information to provide, as fellow modular synth enthusiasts will no doubt be wondering how the hell these pieces were produced.  On the other hand, it goes a long way towards explaining why this release exists in its current format: Gengras himself used the word "obsessed" to describe his thoughts on this new patch and Two Variations is best understood as the audio notebook of a restless engineer constantly inventing new problems to dive into.  While it definitely sounds like music (often very good music, in fact), the content of this release does not feel like the work of a composer honing an idea to perfection.  Rather, it feels like Gengras made his conceptualized patch a reality, got immediately bored, and decided to see how he could warp it further.  Then he got bored again and decided to see how he could warp that further.  Each new stage gets further and further away from the original patch's melodic hooks, with a definite emphasis on getting more unusual rather than on getting stronger or more listenable.
Another factor that plays a large role in the shaping of Two Variations is its format: while available digitally, it was released in physical form as a 68-minute cassette.  That, of course, means that each "variation" needed to be roughly the same length.  It also means that the length was dictated by the longest (and most recent) piece, "04.10.15," a soundboard recording of a live performance.  As a result, the first variation ("03.06.15") is actually two earlier run-throughs of the patch mashed together into a single lengthy piece.  That is somewhat frustrating, as the first run-through is both the shortest and arguably the best of the lot.  While not quite as texturally and rhythmically adventurous as what follows, the first nine minutes of "03.06.15" are a beautifully intricate lattice of plinking and twinkling minor key arpeggios over a warm bass note progression.  Everything is both crystal-clear and appealingly melodic.
All of that goes away in the much longer second half of the piece, which transforms into something a bit more woozy and submerged-sounding.  It is not bad, but it is almost three times as long as its superior predecessor, which is far too long for a piece that does little more than amiably burble and bubble along.  The patch naturally undergoes yet another radical transformation for the impressively bizarre and epic "04.10.15," which mostly eschews melody in favor of something resembling a stuttering, randomized marimba performance in a large, reverberation-friendly space.  Unlike "03.06.15," however, there is some genuine and significant transformation, as a couple of other patches turn up to fleetingly morph the piece into something resembling a dense, slowed-down, and wildly chromatic organ solo followed by a foray into roiling Kosmische psychedelia.
All of that basically adds up to a mixed bag of an album, which I suppose is perfectly fine if cassette releases are viewed as a place to document experiments and test fresh ideas between more formal albums.  Viewed in that light, Two Variations' flaws are mostly inherent ones, both for the format and for the instrumentation: aside from the too-brief opening piece, everything about Two Variations feels naggingly overlong and underedited.  Also, as is generally the case with "live" modular synthesizer performances, each piece is essentially the same idea being endlessly tweaked until Gengras decides that it has gone on long enough.  Granted, "04.10.15" actually contains several different patches, but they always feel like an unrelated interlude being dropped into the middle of a piece rather than a satisfying compositional evolution.  Given those fundamental restraints and the caveat that this is no doubt intended for a rather niche audience, however, Two Variations actually has quite a lot going for it.  While I still miss the lush beauty of Gengras's Moog years, this is an admirably wild and adventurous departure from the more New Age-influenced Ishi and an appealingly deep and longform expansion upon the promise of New Process Music.  In short, there is some legitimately inspired material here, but this is not yet the ideal presentation for it.  Hopefully, that will come later and Gengras's next album will distill these ideas to perfection...unless an even newer process seizes his imagination before he has a chance to get to it, which is (of course) a very legitimate danger.
Tim Hecker has revealed details of his latest album, and first record for 4AD. The Canadian composer will release Love Streams, on 8th April 2016.
Love Streams takes its cues from the avant-classical orchestration and extreme electronic processing of his previous full-length, 2013’s Virgins, but shaped into more melancholic, ultraviolet hues. Inspired by notions of 15th century choral scores (particularly those by Josquin des Prez), transposed to an artificial intelligence-era language of digital resonance and bright synths, the album was assembled gradually, with layers of studio-tracked keyboards, choir and woodwinds being woven into the mix, then molded and disfigured through complex programming. Like hearing some ancient strain of sacred music corrupted by encryption, Hecker admits to thinking about ideas like "liturgical aesthestics after Yeezus" and the "transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune," during its creation.
The Love Streams sessions took place throughout 2014 and 2015 at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, Iceland – where parts of both Virgins and Ravedeath, 1972 were tracked – with Hecker reuniting with the same crew of collaborators from Virgins (Kara-Lis Coverdale, Grímur Helgason) and bolstered by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, whose vocal arrangements were scored by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.
The title of Hecker's new work can be interpreted any number of ways – erotic, technological, spiritual – although his own conception is appropriately vast, calling it "a riff on the ubiquity and nihilism of streaming of all forms of life." Now we stream more than we love. Nowadays music too frequently resembles a product, or white noise. With a career spanning fifteen years, Tim Hecker belongs to a select camp actively resisting this undertow, this reduction in significance.
"While exploring new production techniques using old and unlikely hardware, the results were so unusual that I really had the sense that these pieces of equipment didn't actually create these sounds, rather they were in fact some kind of elaborate reception device that allowed me to tune into transmissions from distant galaxies. The music I could hear was actually the received transmissions of Pop Hits from those Distant Galaxies that were being played on their radio stations. I quickly recorded all that I could before losing the transmission. I consulted with Dr. Andrew Read, the astrophysicist with whom I recorded Guitar Treatments in 1999. He has worked on the discovery of the most distant galaxies and astronomical objects in the Universe. Together we came up with a possible list of where these musical transmissions may have come from."
"The legendary JK Broderick reprises his lushly romantic Final alias for Downwards with an expanded reissue of 2010's My Body is a Dying Machine offered to those who missed it first time around.
Now featuring eight tracks instead of the original five, Black Dollars hits a rich vein of ambient dream-pop that has always been an integral, if quieter part of Broderick's oeuvre since even before Godflesh was born.
Foggy highlights of the original EP such as the looping, blooming noise ecstasy of Gravity and the mind-sweeping guitar strokes of A Slight Return are now supplemented with the blown-out glory of The Eternal Dreamer and the majestic MBV-style swell of Flow River Flow and the vaulted electro-acoustics of The World is Not Waiting For You to make up an epic trip for the road or bedroom."
"Roly Porter zooms out to super macro levels of sidereal physics in Third Law, his debut for Tri Angle and most impressive solo album to date in the wake of Life Cycle of a Massive Star and his formative work with Vex’d.
Eight tracks describes a cataclysmic chain of cosmic events with fathomless attention to detail and a dizzying sense of meter appropriate to the breadth of his compositional and conceptual scope.
Leaving the dancefloor/earth as a speck of dust floating in his rear-view, he evacuates mind/body into a noumenal dimension of near-symphonic energy transfers between interrelated elements of rhythm, bass, and sound design shaped according to his own laws of physics.
In effect it recalls the flaring cinematic scope of Vangelis as much as Iancu Dumitrescu’s pursuit of a spectral music, and likewise the shuddering electro-acoustic masses of his Subtext label-mates, Emptyset and Paul Jebanasam, whilst also paralleling the dark matter investigations of The Haxan Cloak and Fis’s polymetric, psycho-acoustic ecosystems for Tri Angle."
Josephine Foster's No More Lamps In the Morning is a new folk route, a stripped down starsailor vector connecting heller to highwater. Foster, on nylon string guitar, and husband Victor Herrero, accompanying on Portuguese guitar, together weave intimate readings of songs spanning Foster's songwriting career including selections from recent albums This Coming Gladness (2008) and I'm a Dreamer (2013) and back to Born Heller (2004).
Foster's new route is a free, chromatic music, a tuneful montana of mind--an expansive harmonic space dominated by Rif mountain on the horizon. As highwater as the music is, as broad the stylistic palette of the musicians, the music really exists in service of the lyrics. Two of the songs on No More Lamps are poems by Rudyard Kipling and James Joyce given musical settings by Foster. The rest arguably are musical settings of her own poems strengthened in a fiery crucible of guitars (and on 2 tracks Gyða Valtýsdóttir's cello) in which dissonant notes bend and quaver as wirefork embers, dying without affecting the glowing tonal fire which unites contrary forces in a Moroccan speakeasy.
She and Herrero have performed, for an audience of burros, concerts of Federico Garcia Lorca poems set to music. A music of wandering and a music of roots. An impermanent tradition passed down for generations. Let your loved ones know. ~ Written by Chris Davis
This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s.
La Monte Young, widely acknowledged as the father of musical minimalism, is one of the most influential contemporary composers. Yet he has strictly monitored his own discography and his music is rarely heard. Born in a log cabin in rural Idaho in 1935, Young became a key figure in the New York underground art scene of the early 1960s. He made vital contributions to the Fluxus movement and initiated the use of lofts as performance venues. Most important of all, his exploration of sustained tones, unorthodox tuning, high volume and long duration changed the course of twentieth-century music and ushered in new ways of listening.
This LP, initially issued on the French Shandar label in 1973, is a crucial document, preserving two manifestations of Young’s pioneering creative imagination. Each side stretches out to the standard length of an entire long-playing record. Listening to the sounds captured in each groove you are lifted out of routine temporality into a prolonged and personal here and now, an intimate kind of time that no clocks can measure.
On the first side is a performance by the Theatre of Eternal Music, the group which Young formed specifically to realise his radical musical conception. The name was coined in February 1965 to indicate that this ecstatic droning music had neither beginning nor end, that it came from and returned to a state of silence, where it lingers in its full potential until some musicians play its component tones once again. The group’s line-up, which changed over the years but always featured Young and his partner Marian Zazeela, boasted such luminaries of new music as Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and John Cale. Cale carried lessons learnt from Young into his work with the Velvet Underground, and through that seminal group to new generations of indie rockers and noise experimentalists.
On this recording the voices of Young and Zazeela are combined with the trombone of Garrett List and the trumpet of Jon Hassell, now more widely known through his work with Brian Eno. Although the immediate impression created by the music is that it changes little, close listening reveals intricate activity in the high harmonics where unexpected patterns and phantom melodies skitter across the surface of the music’s enveloping drone. Young and Zazeela developed their vocal technique through intensive study with North Indian singing master Pandit Pran Nath, and traces of that influence can be heard in their subtle ornamentation of the sustained tones.
Sine waves provide the basic threads that hold together The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys. Sine waves unadorned form the Drift Study on the second side of the LP. Such pieces were conceived as continuous sound environments. Since 1962 Young has nurtured the notion of a Dream House, in which such work might be installed, playing continuously and taking on a life of its own. To a seated listener this Drift Study appears a very pure form of minimalist musical drone, but move around the space in which the piece is playing and you will hear dramatic variation in the loudness of different frequencies, while your movement will itself alter the structure of air molecules in the room, affecting the way the piece is heard. It’s a fascinating probe into the nature of sound, hearing and spatial awareness.
The Shandar label, under the musical direction of French musicologist Daniel Caux, produced a small but select catalogue. It includes recordings by Albert Ayler, Terry Riley, Sun Ra, Philip Glass, Cecil Taylor, Steve Reich and Charlemagne Palestine. During the early 1970s this was the cutting edge of new music, and today these recordings are still challenging, uplifting and revelatory. This reissue preserves the original artwork, an integral part of that special Shandar magic but also a fine example of the design sense and calligraphic grace that Marian Zazeela has brought to the presentation of La Monte Young’s singular music.
"My own feeling is that if people aren’t carried away to heaven I’m failing," -La Monte Young in 1966
One of downsides to living in the United States is that it is hard to keep up with all of the great limited-release or self-released albums that are continually emerging from the fringes of the UK’s experimental music underground.  While it is not terribly difficult to keep tabs on more established artists like Cyclobe, Nurse With Wound, Richard Skelton, or Current 93, it is very easy for an artist like, say, Áine O'Dwyer to remain under my radar for far longer than I would have liked.  Yet another fine example is this deeply inspired and beautiful homage to Jhonn Balance from early last year recorded by Phil Legard (Ashtray Navigations, Xenis Emputae Travelling Band) and his wife Layla.  While it predictably has some Coil-esque attributes (subtly hallucinatory electronics, a healthy interest in paganism), the Legards admirably transcend those nods by mingling them with their own passions for traditional/early music, yielding a unique strain of ritualistic-sounding rural psychedelia (and one of 2015's most slept-on great albums).
The initial idea (and namesake) for this apparent one-off project originates in Ian Johnstone’s Jhonn Balance memorial, located near a hawthorn tree by Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumbria (the place where Jhonn’s ashes were spread).  Appropriately, work on the album began during the Summer Solstice back in 2014, a decision that Coil certainly would have approved of.  Balance and Peter Christopherson probably would have also appreciated the Legards' penchant for twilit ambiance and eerie, hallucinatory electronic textures, as well as the Legard's use of some deeply unconventional instrumentation (like a fox skull and a spiricom).  In nearly all other respects, however, Hawthonn diverge quite dramatically from Coil’s influence, which is (of course) what makes this album so compelling.  For the most part, these six pieces are built from little more than simple accordion or harmonium chords and Layla's beautifully somnambulant-sounding "ancient Druid priestess" vocals.  The overall feeling is a uniquely languorous, sensual, timeless, and ceremonial one that seems like half-dream, half-distant field recording of a pre-Christian ritual in some Stonehenge-like clearing on a hillside.
While pieces such as "Aura" unquestionably boast lovely half-ghostly/half-angelic melodies, Hawthonn's primary appeal lies in their ability to cast and maintain such a haunting and otherworldly spell.  They also do an absolutely superb job of blurring the lines between structure and abstraction, real versus unreal, and natural versus unnatural.  The opening "Foxglove," for example, opens with untreated field recordings of bird songs before transforming into a simple, lovely vocal melody…that floats above a bed of loud insectoid clacking and chittering.  Also, while Layla's melody remains relatively constant, the surrounding music restlessly shifts between being virtually absent altogether and cohering into ominous swells of dark chords.  Additionally, the vocals themselves eventually dissolve into distant soft-focus dreaminess before ultimately resurfacing in their natural state. There is no real terra firma that can be reliably expected to stick around.  Later on the album, "Ghost" seems to revisit a similar  vocal melody, but it is initially only heard in vaporous fragments amidst a bleary haze of rippling accordion chords, electronic hums, and deep exhalations, though it eventually coheres into something resembling an actual song (albeit one buffeted by spacey electronics).  Throughout the album, Layla acts as kind of a benevolent Siren, guiding me through a fog of buzzing drones, sputtering electronics, and an endlessly shifting landscape of collapsing, dissolving, stretching, and coalescing structures.
As far as faults are concerned, I am hard-pressed to think of anywhere where Phil and Layla made anything resembling a misstep, though there are plenty of unusual sequencing and structural choices that could be viewed that way by listeners with different perspectives than my own.  For example, Hawthonn have a definite tendency towards burying their strongest material in extremely lengthy songs, as both "Foxglove" and "Thanatopsis" clock in at over 16 minutes.  I tend to view that as a wise tendency to ensure that the longer, more ambitious pieces have enough of a melodic hook to keep them compelling for their entire duration though.  It is great that the Legards have such a knack for writing timeless neo-folk melodies, but they are definitely not the endgame or Hawthonn’s real raison d’être.  Rather, they are merely the most immediately graspable facet of a much larger, stranger, and more iconoclastic vision.  Another possible critique is that the album is somewhat amorphous and that all the songs sort of blur together without any real stand-out or real culmination.  Again, however, that is completely by design.  In fact, the album is intended to he heard as one constantly shifting, ebbing, and flowing whole rather than a series of discrete works.  In order to work as well as it does, this album absolutely required a light touch and an unwavering willingness to eschew the sharp edges of reality in favor of a beautifully drifting and flickering reverie.  Layla and Phil succeeded admirably in those regards.  As a result, Hawthonn have achieved the rarest of rarities: a homage that reaches heights similar to its inspiration.