VIKKI JACKMAN - Whispering Pages

The hybridization of dissimilar sound sources is a stimulating field of exploration, and no one more than Andrew Chalk is a master in transforming a simple idea into the sonic depiction of a feeling of overhanging dejection. After her admirable debut on this very label - Of Beauty Reminiscing - pianist Vikki Jackman continues to look at the different approaches to this kind of process. These nine tracks are a decisive step forward in terms of sheer daintiness of the music, although essentially based on the same components. The large part is in fact constructed upon rarefied touches of piano, at times played as in a state of sluggish sadness (“Empty Rooms”), elsewhere modified by studio treatments that cause the instrument to become unrecognizable.

Chalk is definitely present, perhaps with impalpably tailored guitars, bass and additional processing: in a track like “The Softest Blue” plucked strings are traceable amidst spellbinding layers of slow-moving shades. Despite the glitches and hissing frequencies of pieces such as “Never A Wave” trying to shift the music’s gravity centre towards a “current” brand of entrancing electronica the nostalgic factor remains as always preponderant, and there’s no doubt that the unclothed minimalism of these transformed melodic snippets is a critical element in the overall mood of the disc, which - despite being credited to Jackman alone - should positively be called a shared effort. Indeed there are several sections that distinctly recall Chalk’s own work and - especially in “Dreams” and “A Summer Interlude”, both enriched by beautiful field recordings of birds and urban environments - also Brian Eno’s, when the latter was still above suspicion of compromise.

Egoless manifestations of innocence that by no means we’ll cease to appreciate, more than ever when life events force us in a corner and start hitting hard to the body.

Faraway Press

CHRISTOPHER MCFALL - The City Of Almost

Kansas City’s Christopher McFall began to pull together these tracks after moving in a studio situated in an erstwhile flourishing part of the town, an area where “avenues were rife with commerce and business”. As it happens, the cheerful times didn’t last and those environs - where the composer still works - have deteriorated to the point of wreck, thus prompting him to illustrate the place as “The City Of Almost”.

McFall has awakened our interest time and again throughout the latest months, thanks to superbly conceived pieces that give a voice to that unfathomable, lump-in-the-throat glumness brought forth by desperation and neglect, particularly when referred to a desolate kind of metropolitan wretchedness. Yet he’s able to extract the vital juice that renders those depressing snapshots nearly desirable, or at least akin to the sense of belonging that humans helplessly seek out for the whole extent of their inconsequential life. Feeling in synch with a bleak quarter is one of those inexplicable frames of mind producing a blend of sorrow and interior peace, and McFall captures exactly that balance in the recordings. His soundscapes contain crumbling gatherings, underground lamentations, postindustrial-like whirring secretions and, the most fascinating characteristic of this very disc, what appears as mourning chorales of mutely weeping souls, appearing every once in a while to remind about the complete unreliability of good intentions, rapidly swept away by a single event or the necessity of adapting even to a disgusting compromise, if only to keep living to tell the tale.

The ill-omened loops and intimidating spirals defining the overall aesthetic of this album in a track such as “All Parts Contained” distance the work of this man from the humdrum-drone activities of our day’s dumb multitudes, placing The City Of Almost in the restricted-access room containing the few authentic masterpieces of grief-eliciting music.

Sourdine

ARSENIJE JOVANOVIĆ - Galiola

Criminally under-recorded, the music of composer and director Arsenije Jovanović possesses the kind of remarkable qualities that, love it or hate it, are going to finger the nerves of those who listen conscientiously. The nearest thing to a blurred concept of “notoriety” for this artist derives from the involvement in the soundtrack to Terrence Malick’s movie “The Thin Red Line”, which in fact features Jovanović’s “Prophecy of the Village Kremna”. That’s the longest and most suggestive vision in this four-episode compilation, based as it is on an ancient Serbian prediction, a numinous foretelling about “catastrophic events and apocalyptic occurrences which will fall upon the homeland and its people”. A sequence of haunting female voices, lingering nocturnal appearances, distant moans, sighs and mumbles, humming low frequencies chipping away at the tranquillity of a candid latecomer, likely to have impressionable audiences sleeping rather uncomfortably should this track be played at late evening.

Strikingly emotional as well is 1967’s “Tombstones Along the Roadside”, described as a “national Danse Macabre” by the originator; initially conceived as a theatrical stage act, the composition honours the innocent victims of the Balkan wars from the end of 19th century to WWII, portions of the texts taken from the gravestones of deceased soldiers and subsequently transformed in monologues and hypothetical dialogues between the sufferers and their tormentors. The remaining tracks are, to some extent, not as much of evil-boding - but extraordinary nonetheless. “Prayer for One Galiola” was born from an unpleasant incident as, many years back, Jovanović found himself lost at sea in the dead of night, his boat’s engine not working (he landed on a small island named Galiola after hours of wandering in the waters), and also from an assortment of hallucinations following a car accident that, somehow, were all associated with this name. “Les Vents du Camargue” is the most concrete-sounding affair, the main source being the Mistral that made impossible an external recording at first and took the leading role afterwards, either through its forceful blowing or via the psychological mechanisms that were set in motion by the wind’s influence, the whole taped at the Cathedral of St. Trophime in Arles. Still, this depiction doesn’t even acquaint with a tiny bit of what this great piece sounds like.

Jovanović’s particulars are uniquely vivid, having the large part of this music been written for radio broadcasts (and, in general, rarely performed). The dramatic aspects are definitely predominant, often disturbing; there’s a sort of bloodcurdling magnificence emerging in several fractions of these sonic constructions which is both illogical and inescapable, analogously to the attraction for the gruesome details of a scene of death that many people experience. Here’s to hoping that more of this body of work is unearthed, especially if the standards of inventiveness are confirmed at this level of impressive consistency.

FO A RM
And/OAR
Alluvial

RICHARD SKELTON - Marking Time

Those who listen to it at the appropriate moment instantly recognize the signs. Richard Skelton’s music is hedged by a well-perceptible melancholy, its wooden scents suffusing the responsive listener’s psyche by projecting memories to places where one’s sure of having been a part of something - perhaps as trees, clouds, engraved stones, butterflies; certainly not as humans - and eventually to return to, sooner or later.

Marking Time represents the first occasion in which Skelton appears in real name on a label different than Sustain-Release, but the fundamental nature of his wonderful sonic craft hasn’t changed a iota. An inborn consistency, deriving from the ideal intertwining of two or three essential melodic/harmonic constituents, is what pushes the pieces towards the spots of the soul where a cyclic chord or the knitting of reiterated linear patterns can literally germinate, burgeoning into undersized plants whose roots hold on to the inside parts of the mental organism that want to escape from the well disguised but still visible psychoses of a desperate mass, causing an effect of regretful understanding - the very reason for remaining with feet firmly planted in that grief, the element that, ultimately, is going to fortify our individual being, the factor which constitutes yet another small step to the ever-imperfect integration with a surrounding world which isn’t even a simulacrum of the idea of wonderland that mothers lulled us with in the early stages of living.

Sparse piano chords are scarred by noises of slacked strings and gentle hits on the instrument’s bodies, as to recall a malfunctioning clock signalling that the time has come to finally turn that page of the dusty book of consciousness; perpetual silhouettes of plangent violins and winded harmoniums provide evidence that there’s actually no need to wait for a presumed “future life” to realize that the quintessence of total awareness is achievable, if only we manage to unlock the mind from the trap of words. Were this writer forced to choose a symbol to represent the concept of dolorous beauty expressed by the Lancashire musician, the pick should be “Lowe”: a heartrending synopsis of everything that’s feared right before disposing of adolescence, the uneasiness originating from the impossibility of transmitting this deeply emotional message to the right persons.

Those creatures do exist. Mr. Skelton is one of them, and letting the artist’s call for attention unanswered would be outright foolish. This music is the key to a different dimension of our existential form, as precious as the devotion to someone that you have the fortune to meet in time and will always keep in your heart, whatever happens.

Preservation