The PhiLL(er)



what god doesn't bless, you won't love; what you don't love, the child won't know Cover
Shedding

what god doesn't bless, you won't love; what you don't love, the child won't know
Hometapes

I'm not sure I have the knowledge or vocabulary to describe this album in any coherent way. According to the notes it was inspired by birdsongs and Eric Dolphy (who also found inspiration in birdsong, apparently). The songs, or rather, pieces, are composed using both instruments (percussion and bass) and samples.

The first, a relatively short (just under six minutes) affair creates a somewhat haunting, but not necessarily uneasy atmosphere with an underlying hum and flitting clarinet (I think) samples and some light use of cymbals. Track number two brings a more straightforward drumbeat into play, but sprawling over the course of nearly fourteen minutes, it is by no means a pop song, kids. Chords created by sampled saxophone and clarinet mingle with the pulse of a bowed bass and turn into new versions of those birdsong flitters established in the first piece. When the drums cut out, somewhere around the halfway mark, a bird chorus of samples sings like it's dawn and continues, although now the straightforward composition begins to take itself apart before it puts itself back together, and then just leaves things to the birds—by which I mean the sax/clarinet samples—and peters out into dusk. This is thoughtful music, and demands to be listened to, rather than slapped on as background. The third and final piece is just shy of twenty minutes, and sounds more like waterbirds to me, with longer, deeper tones from the sampled jazz intstruments, whereas the other pieces have more of a woodlands sound to them.

Despite the complexity of the music there's a beguiling simplicity to all these proceedings, which seems to come about through the spareness of the compositions, the attention given to the role of silence and space, and also through the limited number of instruments or sounds—there's not a huge pile of different sounds sitting on top of each other. Anyway, as I said, I don't really have the expertise to describe this sort of thing with any sense of intelligence, but it's certainly some of the most interesting and delicate music to pass through my ears in a fair long while.