Ether column, November 2008

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The Vienna Songwriting Association are a fine group of individuals who promote concerts of folk and acoustic music all year round in this city. As well as this, every November they put on a three-day festival of internationally known artists, the Bluebird Festival, at Porgy & Bess. There are some great names at this year’s event, such as Okkervil River playing almost a year to the day since their last appearance in Vienna. I raved about them in my November 2007 column, so let’s talk instead about one of my all-time musical heroes, American singer and songwriter Michael Gira. Gira initially made his name as the driving force behind Swans, a crushingly loud and formidable outfit who emerged from the creative ferment that was early ’80s downtown New York. When they first came to public attention, Swans presented a vision of rock music as a form of abjection, with bone-crunching percussion to the fore and lyrics that focused relentlessly on traumatic explorations of work, sex and the body. Over the years they gradually let the light in, bringing softer and more acoustic textures into their music. After Gira ended Swans in 1997 he began a new project, the Angels of Light, which placed even more emphasis on acoustic elements. In all of these incarnations, however, Gira has never swerved from an implacable belief in the atavistic power of the song. Straining with every muscle and sinew of his body, he sings with immense authority and commitment, every moment of his performance filled with tenderness and rage. This rare solo appearance by one of rock music’s most exceptional talents should on no account be missed.

Early next month, soulful British group Tindersticks stop off in Vienna on their first tour in several years. Like many others, I had doubted that they would ever return to active service. Over 15 years and seven albums, Tindersticks have perfected a literate and highly listenable blend of alternative rock, chamber music, soul and jazz, defined by rich string-laden orchestrations and the desolate croon of singer and lyricist Stuart Staples. Having released nothing new since 2003 and with rumours of a split rife, their story seemed on the brink of an end; to my great pleasure, however, they are back with an excellent new album, The Hungry Saw. Although three of the original members have now left, the new album is a worthy addition to the group’s catalogue and will no doubt be subjected to passionate live treatment. Staples is an enigmatic figure, rarely speaking onstage and often seeming to be transported elsewhere as he performs; he has remained tight-lipped about the reasons for the split. But the group bring a marvellously intuitive sense of drama and mystery to their songs, with violin, brass and organ enveloping the listener in a warm and tender embrace.

The sad story of the Sofiensaal

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Living near Landstraße station in the third district of Vienna, it’s a fairly common sight to see little groups of tourists clutching maps, gamely trying to navigate their way through the area’s quiet, densely laid out streets. It’s a safe bet that they’re on their way to that gaudy and fanciful construction, the Hundertwasserhaus. But if they’re lucky along the way, they’ll chance upon the remains of a building that has its own, sad story to tell – a story that resonates powerfully with the cultural identity of Vienna.

In 1826 Franz Morawetz commissioned a new building from the architects August Sicard and Eduard van der Nüll (who were later to design the Vienna Opera House together – van der Nüll being so distressed by criticism of its sunken appearance that he committed suicide). Located at Marxergasse 17, it was originally a steam bath and known as the Sofienbad – named after Princess Sophie of Bavaria, the mother of Emperor Franz Josef I. The Viennese, however, did not take to steam bathing as those in Budapest had done, and between 1845 and 1849 the Sofienbad was converted into a concert and dance hall and renamed the Sofiensaal. Johann Strauss I performed there regularly and conducted at the opening ball in 1849. Later, many of the Strauss family’s waltzes were first performed there. In 1886, a second smaller hall was added, the Blauer Salon.

The building’s origins as a steam bath – principally its large, vaulted ceiling and the pool beneath the floor – gave the hall excellent acoustic properties. For this reason, Decca Records adopted the building as its principal European recording venue from 1956 to the mid-1980s. The senior producer of classical recordings for the company for much of this time was John Culshaw, who revolutionised the recording of opera. Culshaw’s innovation was to make the singers move about in the studio as they would onstage, in contrast to simply putting microphones in front of the performers as was common practice at the time. Notable recordings made at the Sofiensaal during this period included the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, conducted by Georg Solti, which was received with great acclaim.

In later years the Sofiensaal fell into disuse as a recording studio and was used for discos and parties. The last recording made there, in 2001, was of the Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos playing solo piano works by Schubert.

In early 2001, the building’s owners announced plans to redevelop the Sofiensaal as a conference centre. However, it was destroyed by fire in August the same year, apparently due to careless routine maintenance work. The fire burned for more than eight hours and completely destroyed the main ballroom, although the facade and walls of the building survived. Some of the decorative stucco work on the walls survived the fire, as did the Blauer Salon. There were no reported deaths or injuries.

Unprotected from the elements since the fire, the Sofiensaal has been in a sad state of gradual decay. Earlier this year, after much legal wrangling, plans were finally announced to redevelop the site and turn it into apartments [December 2008 update: the latest plans are for a hotel]. It’s a shame that in a city so full of cultural activity, it’s apparently out of the question that this once glorious building could return to its former use. What’s even more poignant is that the collective experiences of music and dance are to be ceded to the demands of contemporary urban living. Let’s hope that the shades of Strauss, Schubert and Wagner will one day float over the new Sofiensaal, bestowing upon its fortunate occupants the melodic echoes of its past.

Okkervil River, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 22 November 2008

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Okkervil River’s concert at Porgy & Bess on Saturday night is a very strong contender for my show of the year. With just a few weeks to go before 2008 wraps up, its pole position is unlikely to be overtaken. This was a night of sheer blinding inspiration, with song after song ramming home extraordinary amounts of rhythmic flair and melodic inventiveness. In Will Sheff the group has a frontman like none I have ever seen: searingly honest, passionate and quite transported in his breathtaking urge to communicate through live performance.

The epic “A Girl In Port,” from Okkervil’s 2007 album The Stage Names, is probably the best song I’ve heard all year, and repeated listens have convinced me of its greatness. So when the group launched into it as the very first song of this concert, I knew at once that it was going to be a highly memorable evening. And so it proved, as the concert unfolded into a shatteringly effective piece of communal music theatre. Whether welded to his acoustic guitar, clinging to the microphone stand, leaning precipitously over the stage or sharing a moment of closeness with the immaculate band behind him, Sheff does nothing less than redefine the limits of what it is possible for a musician to do onstage. His smile is winning, his voice emotive, his communion with the audience uniquely close and thrilling. After “A Girl In Port,” the other song that has had a deep impact on me this year is “Black,” from 2005’s Black Sheep Boy. I was praying they would play it, but dared not hope; when they launched into this surging rollercoaster of a song, I felt… well, there are really no words.

With their cover version of Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz,” chosen and rehearsed (so Sheff told us) specifically for this concert, Okkervil River displayed a sense of place and a generosity of spirit that contrasted markedly with Cohen’s own performance of the same song here in Vienna a few months ago. Sheff said the group always enjoy playing here because of the response they receive from the audiences. Maybe he says that every night, although somehow I doubt it. In any event, for them to play that song here felt like a precious gift from the group to the audience. The old groaner, on the other hand, made no specific introduction to the song when he played it in Vienna, as if refusing to acknowledge that there was something beautiful and special about hearing the song played by its author in the magnificent surroundings of the Konzerthaus. This dogged refusal to deviate one iota from his prepared script on those two evenings was profoundly depressing.

And I’m really not in the habit of doing this kind of thing, but on Saturday I couldn’t resist: I reached out and shook Sheff’s hand as he left the stage, then stretched over and retrieved not one but two of his discarded guitar picks (Jim Dunlop 0.6mm, if you’re interested). Whether they’ll enable any of the magic of this concert to transfer to my own hopeless attempts to play the guitar remains to be seen. In any event, this was an evening of transformative joy and elation such as I have rarely if ever experienced in a concert hall.

Photos by David Murobi here.

Michael Gira, Porgy & Bess, Vienna, 21 November 2008

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There seems to be an occasional series of concert reviews on this blog — see Leonard Cohen, Whitehouse and Einstürzende Neubauten — that mostly consist of Epiphanies-style reminiscences of my first awareness of the artist in question. This, though, is the one I’ve been waiting to write — how I fell in love with Swans, the most important group of my life.

I recall the time very well. I was at Sussex University in 1987, casting around for new music to love. I had outgrown the obsessions with Gary Numan and Pink Floyd that marked my teenage years, had taken quite happily to the subdued acoustic muse of Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Vega, but was undoubtedly in need of something more acute. Every week I would scour the pages of the NME — still then my main source of music news, although not for much longer — in search of wisdom and enlightenment. One week I read a review of Swans’ Children of God that was to change my life, although I didn’t know it at the time. I can’t remember who penned it, but this is how it concluded: “And it’s ugly, and it’s difficult, and it’s long and sometimes wearying, and peculiarly beautiful, and utterly essential.” Well, that was it for me. I had never heard a note of this music, had no great history of liking this kind of thing, but when I saw that Swans (not The Swans, as I quickly learned) were playing in Brighton soon, I bought a ticket straight away. I got the album the day after the concert, and I was hooked for life.

Over the next few years, I saw Swans live a few more times (at the Zap Club on the seafront, and in London at the Town & Country Club and the now defunct Kilburn National Ballroom), and bought each new record as it came out, enthralled by the beauty and power inherent in this music. The real turning point, however, came when I wrote a fan letter to the address printed on the cover of 1991’s White Light From The Mouth of Infinity. I expected to hear back, if at all, from some kind of management flunkey; what I certainly didn’t expect was to receive a long and detailed reply from singer and keyboard player Jarboe herself. This kindness and generosity continued over many years in her correspondence with me; in those pre-email days it was a genuine thrill when a letter postmarked Atlanta dropped through my letterbox.

The apex of my association with Swans came in 1997 when Michael Gira asked me to be the merchandise seller on their farewell tour of Europe. As one might imagine, this was an offer I mulled over for perhaps 1.5 seconds before accepting. It was the experience of a lifetime, with 30-odd concerts over six weeks in such widespread countries as France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria (yes, the Szene Wien), Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Slovenia, with the last ever Swans concert taking place in my then home town of London on 15 March 1997, in the rather dingy surroundings of the now defunct LA2. Out there somewhere, there’s a recording of that night in which Gira makes a between-songs announcement thanking me for my work on the tour. I don’t have a copy myself, so please get in touch if you do. Rather mind-bogglingly, those words were the last he ever spoke (as opposed to sang) from the stage as a member of Swans.

I have a tour-bus load of memories of those six weeks, the good, the bad and the ugly, but if it’s all the same to you I’m going to keep them to myself (with the exception of this rather facetious letter which I wrote to The Wire last year). I will say that it was by some measure the hardest work I’ve ever done; this was not a matter of a few T-shirts. There were shirts, books, CDs, records, tapes, badges, stickers and wooden boxes, all of which had to be loaded in and out, sold and accounted for in any number of currencies (no euros then!). I’m well aware, though, that I was slumming it compared to the Herculean nightly efforts of the band and the rest of the road crew. And if anyone reading this bought anything from the merch table on Swans’ last European tour, I hope you were happy with what you bought.

Fast forward eleven years and I’m at Porgy & Bess for a solo concert by Michael Gira. This form represents a distillation and finessing of everything I ever loved about Swans: the brimming rage, the barely controlled power and the passionate intensity. The lyrics, as ever, are extraordinary: visionary, convulsive flashes of elemental forces, drenched in deep colours hewn from the strings and wood of Gira’s guitar. And when he plays my favourite Swans song, the overwhelmingly bleak and nihilistic “God Damn The Sun,” as the encore, I think… well, at the very least, I’m in the right place tonight.

Nurse With Wound: Shipwreck Radio Vols. 1 & 2, Soundpooling

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As Nurse With Wound approach their 30th year of activity, their public profile is higher than ever. A slew of new releases and reissues, a series of well received live performances and a collaboration with Faust have all served to raise awareness of Steven Stapleton’s formidably strange life’s work, once shrouded in mystery and anonymity. The famously eremitic Stapleton, who lives with his family in a remote farmhouse in Ireland, has even dipped his toe into the fetid waters of internet commerce, selling limited edition prints through his official Website.

Time was when Nurse With Wound consisted of Steven Stapleton plus whoever he chose to gather around him to help realise his surreal musical imaginings. In recent years, though, and coinciding with their emergence blinking into the realm of live performance, NWW have begun to take on the properties of a group. Long-time Stapleton collaborator Colin Potter, who releases NWW’s albums on his ICR label, is the other core member, augmented for live work by Andrew Liles, Matt Waldron and David Tibet of Current 93, whose musical journey is in many respects inseparable from Stapleton’s.

Throughout this period of increased activity, however, the music of Nurse With Wound has retained an enviable air of self-effacement and mystique. This aura of detachment stems from a willed refusal on the part of the music’s authors to allow their individuality to be imprinted upon it. It’s music that rigorously avoids the facile imparting of meaning through personality and association. Instead it communicates with the listener through a system of atavistic codes and signifiers, leaving a disquieting impression of dislocation and wrongness.

The two double albums comprising volumes 1 and 2 of Shipwreck Radio (a third volume was not received for review) are prime examples of this scrupulous working through of the alien and strange. Casting themselves in the role of sonic explorers, Stapleton and Potter ventured north to the Lofoten Islands in the Norwegian Arctic, winding up in the small village of Svolvaer, where they remained for two months. During that time they made regular broadcasts on local radio, some of which now form the music on these albums. Clocking in (with one double-length exception) at 15 minutes each, the predominant mode of these tracks is Isolationist soundscaping, with multilayered drones and frequencies piling up and shifting restlessly around each other. This being Nurse With Wound, however, there’s far more going on here than just ambient hum and flutter. Central to the concept of the piece was that Potter and Stapleton had to take all the sounds they used from objects and environments they found in and around Lofoten. The resulting source material is presented in various ways, from untreated field recordings to heavily processed interventions.

Volume 1 opens with a dose of just such heaviosity, “June 15”, as a tumbling rock riff locks itself inside your skull and refuses to leave. Distorted, looped and heavily percussive, this juggernaut opening is a fearsome statement of intent. When the onslaught subsides, some local colour is added in the form of cut up and looped spoken voices. These are familiar Stapleton tropes, and they act rather as filler here. It’s a relief when “June 17” arrives, a beautifully paced 30-minute chorale of birdsong, rainfall, running water and distant voices. Slowly, imperceptibly, electronic treatments are added to these atmospheric sounds, infecting them with strangeness. Finally, we hear the sounds of local festivities, including a brass band, mangled and pitch-shifted to the point of unrecognisability.

The remaining pieces on both volumes amplify and extend the sense of inhospitability that permeates the project. Stapleton and Potter turn for inspiration away from the village and its people, and towards the harshness of the sea that surrounds them. The sound sources move outwards and downwards, becoming deep, murky and clanky and recalling NWW’s earlier Salt Marie Celeste, a particularly sinister evocation of oceanic dread. On the closing piece of volume 1, “June 20”, a thick musical fog descends slowly around a succession of indistinct rattles and thuds.

Volume 2 is more varied musically, with “June 19” being especially enjoyable. Until the appearance of the long-promised NWW hip-hop album, this may be the most danceable thing Stapleton has ever done. Although it wasn’t the last to be broadcast, its placing at the end of volume 2 makes perfect sense, with its insistent percussive throb and its movement away from the hardships conjured earlier and towards some kind of resolution and farewell.

In a further indication of NWW’s reconstitution as a group, they have also dropped that most rockist of manoeuvres, the live album. Soundpooling is rather special, however – a document of the first NWW concerts in 21 years, which took place in 2005. Conceived and organised by Walter Robotka of Vienna electronic label Klanggalerie, the three gigs were held at the Narrenturm pathological museum in Vienna and were not actually billed as NWW concerts (advance publicity just listed the names of the group members). Wearing white lab coats in keeping with the medical setting, the group performed improvisations on the aforementioned Salt Marie Celeste, of which the recording here is the third. Another NWW piece, Echo Poème, is also blended into the mix, resulting in an hour-long, distinctly filmic narrative of disorientation. The looming drones and watery creaks that made the original Salt Marie Celeste a work of such ominous foreboding recur in abundance here, along with enough disembodied cries, moans and cackles to soundtrack any number of nightmares. A bonus studio track, “In Swollen Silence”, rounds things off in grandstanding style with calm instrumental textures and a brief, surreal song, punctuated by crazed vocal and electronic interjections. In the world of Nurse With Wound, something nasty is never far away.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 16, 2008)

Tanakh: Ardent Fevers

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This fourth Tanakh album is, like its predecessors, largely the work of Jesse Poe. More song-oriented than previous efforts, it nods in the direction of various past luminaries while confidently asserting its own identity thanks to Poe’s particular brand of sensitive, literate songwriting.

Poe is very much the guiding light, singing lead vocals, writing all the lyrics and much of the music, and playing lead electric and acoustic guitar to boot. He’s joined by a large cast of musicians including ex-Belle & Sebastian waif Isobel Campbell on cello and avant drummer Alex Neilson, sounding noticeably more fluid and restrained than on his recent outings with Jandek. The prevailing mood is decidedly mellow and unhurried, with songs like “Deeper” offering cool, jazzy sax and organ flourishes among the conventional alt-rock stylings.

The crepuscular “5 am” sees Tanakh neatly evoking the spirit of Nick Drake with gorgeous acoustic guitar work and rapturous flashes of cornet. Singing in a dark half-whisper, Poe avoids triteness and affectingly romanticises the night-time moment: “I roll over and find you there, so still in your beauty, with your lovely red hair…” On “Like I Used To”, dry-as-dust lap steel guitar (courtesy of Phil Murphy) merges beautifully with Poe’s cyclical riffing to create a warped alt-country mood, while “Restless Hands” settles effortlessly into a lithe folk-pop groove.

As a collection of such languorous moments, Ardent Fevers is well nigh perfect; it has further treasures to yield, however, igniting spectacularly on the lengthy “Still Trying To Find You Home” and “Take & Read.” Both these tracks begin slowly and quietly, with Poe alighting on a solemn Leonard Cohen acoustic plane before opening up into huge juggernauts of Neil Young-style electric riffing. As audacious as they are unexpected, they transform Ardent Fevers from a good album into very nearly a great one.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 16, 2008)

Michael Gira: Songs for a Dog

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An odd release, this – a mish-mash of previously released and unreleased material, it nevertheless provide a useful introduction to one side of Michael Gira’s post-Swans work.

Half of the ten songs are taken from I Am Singing to You From My Room, a solo CD originally released in a limited edition of 1000 through Gira’s website (a second edition is now available). Of the rest, two reappear from What We Did, Gira’s collaborative CD with Dan Matz of Windsor for the Derby, while one is an outtake from the sessions that produced New Mother, the first album by Gira’s principal post-Swans project, Angels of Light. Finally, there’s a solo version of one of Swans’ most harrowing songs, “God Damn The Sun”, and one completely new song, “Promise of Water”.

These songs represent Gira’s muse at its most stripped down and intimate, reflecting his urge to communicate through the simplest and purest of means. For the most part, they are shorn of the baroque intensity that characterises Gira’s work as Angels of Light. Although they consist of just a voice and an acoustic guitar, these are not folk songs. Wrought from dark, atavistic impulses, they proceed in a manner more akin to a sermon. Gira’s authoritative baritone moves effortlessly between the gentle, the reproachful and the accusatory, inhabiting the songs utterly and turning them into vehicles for spontaneous, unmediated expression. The lyrics are rapturous explosions of hallucinatory imagery, saturated in colours and sensations, while the guitar playing is a sinister, vertiginous thrumming. This is a truly potent mix; Gira’s take on songform is dazzling and unique.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 16, 2008)

Maurizio Bianchi: Elisionem

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Maurizio Bianchi is an Italian noise musician who is perhaps best known for his early association with Whitehouse and their Come Org label. In 1981, Bianchi gave copies of his early noise recordings to Whitehouse’s William Bennett, who re-edited them without Bianchi’s approval and released two albums’ worth of material under the name Leibstandarte SS MB. Bianchi himself does not count these albums as part of his oeuvre, even though they are undoubtedly responsible in part for such public profile as he currently has.

He released at least ten further albums in the early 80s, before getting religion and retiring from music. Reactivating his career in 1998, he has been making up for lost time with an avalanche of recordings on a bewildering variety of labels, including this one on Klanggalerie, the leading Austrian label for avant-garde electronic and noise music.

The album’s presentation has a distinctly scientific bearing; track titles include “Proteic Suppression”, “Glutenous Dispositive” and “Histological Amalgam”, while the sleeve notes – possibly with tongue in cheek – attempt to elucidate the album’s title with a screed that begins “The ‘elisionem’, in the avant-gardist branch, is a sound absorbent course used to amalgamate various sonorous elements into one.” Feeling none the wiser, one proceeds to listen to the record.

Wholly electronic in origin, the music on this collection of drone- and loop-based pieces is dramatic and forbidding. The hypnotic, serpentine repetitions of “Proteic Suppression” are reminiscent of Zoviet France, while “Syllabic Microbes” is quieter and more mysterious, until a series of harsh metallic stabs upsets the track’s equilibrium. At 24 minutes, “Elliptic Iontophoresis” is the longest and most effective piece on the album. Microscopically detailed in texture, its soundworld begins with high and low end drones that give way to grating clashes, stricken movements and a gradual ratcheting up of tension. Finally, the drama retreats into a sense of relative calm, with swirling astral patterns and periodic bursts of activity. Whatever its scientific basis, this is a very fine album of dark ambient atmospherics.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 16, 2008)

Graf & Zyx: Trust No Woman Plus

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Along strikingly similar lines to Cultural Amnesia’s Enormous Savages, here’s a reissue of another lost artefact of electronic pop. This time the Klanggalerie label has disinterred the very rare 1981 album Trust No Woman by the Austrian duo of Inge Graf and Walter Zyx, adding a slew of bonus tracks ranging from 1977 to 1986 for good measure.

The record is remarkably ahead of its time, and one wonders how it is that Graf & Zyx have until now been so under-reported – and, indeed, under-appreciated – in the history of synthesised pop music. It’s quite staggering, in fact, to listen to a track like “Sorrow and Sadness”, with its clipped, multi-tracked vocals, spacey synths and restrained percussion, and to learn that it dates from as far back as 1977. Those first Graf & Zyx songs – “I Look Out” and “Get Away Dark Side” also date from this period – have a rough, weathered feel that points to Cabaret Voltaire as being the duo’s closest peers at that stage.

Throughout the early ’80s, Graf & Zyx deepened and refined their approach and produced Trust No Woman, the album that forms the core of the present reissue. Building on the early work of Gary Numan – who, for all the critical opprobrium piled upon him, was a crucially important figure in the development of electronic pop – and the original Human League, Graf & Zyx designed their short, immediate songs around a barrage of analogue synths, rock-solid electro beats and controlled, low-key vox. From 1982, “I Use You” (the title sounds like something an early computer might have come out with) is simple, undulant and strangely moving, infused with the spirit of hopeful discovery that accompanied the introduction of affordable home computers and synthesisers at that time: “Empty room in my mind/they are talking from behind/but I use you/when I look away…” Graf & Zyx may not be as revered or, indeed, as important as Kraftwerk; yet their work shares the technological melancholy that suffuses through the music of the men from Düsseldorf.

With a total of 24 tracks on the album, there was always going to be the occasional clunker, and certainly Graf & Zyx were not always as sharp as they might have been. The cringemaking “Love Your Dog” is a very silly, faux-operatic piece of doggy do-do, while “Ciao Lucia” plods along for five interminable minutes without ever raising a flicker of interest. These lapses, though, are thankfully rare. And the album ends on a perfect flourish with a key track, “When Darkness Comes” – not only the last and longest song on the record, but the only one whose lyric is printed on the insert. Its extended instrumental outro is a bubbling, perfectly paced synth workout; bright, lively and profoundly tuneful, it revels, like the album as a whole, in its own formal boldness and innovation.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 16, 2008)

George: A Week of Kindness

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A week of kindness is the very least you should extend to anyone who introduces you to this little gem. The duo of Michael Varty and Suzy Mangian have produced an inspired fusion of icy slowcore, lo-fi instrumental textures and ethereal electronic atmospheres. At times calling to mind the achingly sad quietude of Low, at others the aerated starkness of Julee Cruise, the album progresses through its fifteen tracks like a slowly unfolding musical drama.

The purity of Mangian’s voice is heard to sumptuous effect on “The Living Sound,” hovering over simple piano and percussion. Varty and Mangian sing together on “Now You Want To Settle Down,” their voices floating in feathery harmony as they anatomise chilly, wounded emotion: “Whisper to me words of happiness, too far-fetched at best, go home to him.” In between, the instrumental “Week of Wonders” draws faint lines of recorder and flute against an ominous crescendo of liquid electronic noise.

Exhibiting flashes of wry humour on “Spend My Time” (“I’ve no time for drinking, because I spend all my time with you”), and the occasional moment of Kate Bush-style eccentricity, George ultimately keep returning to a position of rigorous calm and caution. Instrumentation is spare and intensely evocative: dustbowl banjo on “Song of Degrees,” drifty organ on “Fabula” and a touch of accordion on “Joy Could Be Here” that somehow conjures up a vision of blasted Englishness. Musing that “words have a way of resounding off surfaces,” the song acknowledges the existence of joy while simultaneously appearing unable to believe in it. It’s this tentativeness, this sense of quiet exploration at its own careful pace, that makes A Week of Kindness such an uncompromisingly fine record.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 16, 2008)