Reviews | Evening of Light

Cloudscape #42: November 2013

Cloudscape #42: November 2013 by Evening Of Light on Mixcloud

Art: The Veil by Claudio Bravo.

Tracklist:

The Floating World and the Wood Beyond

The Floating World is the main artistic project of Amanda Votta, specialising in flute-based ambient music with dark and mysterious undertones. Starting as a solo flute project with its first releases eight years ago, it has since attracted numerous collaborators on various instruments and, occasionally, spoken word. Recent albums The Apparition and We Hunted have appeared on Cyclic Law and Reverb Worship, respectively, and this label attention will hopefully propel Votta’s music into a wider audience. Her latest album, The Wood Beyond the World, is just out on Eclipse, the subsidiary label of Cyclic Law. [...] The interview below is the result of an email conversation I had with Amanda. My intention was not just to give her the opportunity to tell us a bit about the history of The Floating World, but also to get her to delve a bit deeper into literary and art history, a topic I know she enjoys. As you’ll see, those promises were fulfilled, as Amanda has a lot to say on the subject. [...read more...]

Bushes and Briars: A Brief Raving Folk History

Songs are sometimes immortal travellers, and if you follow their tracks, you end up in all kinds of places. Regular readers will know I have a weak spot for folk ballads, and their history and various interpretations are fascinating to track. Bushes and Briars came onto my path from different directions, but I’ll get to that later. The oldest mentions of the ballad that I could find are from nineteenth century broadsides such as this one. It’s a classic love ballad, in the sense that it explores some of the troubles and uncertainties of love and relationships. The woman in the song doesn’t trust men, and the last line suggests she’s driven to suicide because of it. Within the context of British ballads as a whole, that is understandable, as many of them are about men preying on (and murdering) women. In 1904, the song was collected and rearranged by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and from there on it entered into the repertoire of many choir and solo singers. [...read more...]

Review: Bruno Heinen Sextet & Karlheinz Stockhausen – Tierkreis (2013)

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s piece Tierkreis (composed in 1974/75) is a zodiacal work that leaves a lot of freedom to the performer. This series of twelve melodies, one for each sign, was originally written for music boxes, but can basically be played on any instrument, and there have been many different versions: for piano, voice, lute, orchestra, etc. A search on YouTube will yield several examples to satisfy your curiosity. Interpreted like this, the music often maintains much of its original airiness, but you could just as well jazzify the thing, which is what Bruno Heinen did with his sextet (Heinen: piano; Sigurta: trumpet; Allsopp: bass clarinet; Challenger: tenor sax; Di Biase: bass; Scott: drums). [...read more...]

Review: In Gowan Ring – The Glinting Spade (1999)

Rereleases long overdue is primarily a relevant category when you don’t own the original album. Apparently, I got the absolute last copy of the original The Glinting Spade CD when I bought it from Bluesanct some seven years back, or at least that’s what the label told me. It’s been sold out since then, and while the surrounding albums The Twin Trees and Hazel Steps Through a Weathered Home had been given new editions by Shayo at around the same time, The Glinting Spade had to wait to this year to be overhauled by German label Merlin’s Nose. The groundbreaking début album Love Charms has been wallowing in obscurity since 1994, but hey, what can you do. Maybe something to consider for its 20th anniversary next year? For those who for whatever reason didn’t snag a copy of the original release, here are some reasons why the new issue should get your attention. [...read more...]

Review: Martyn Bates – Unsung (2012)

I’m just going to keep on pushing Martyn Bates until you’re sick of it, and then continue doing it. Although he’s surely not the only one deserving this unenviable status, he’s the first person I think of when I consider artists with severely underrated careers. Bates had been making music since the late seventies, most famously as half of Eyeless in Gaza, spanning genres from noise to pop, rock to ambient, and his staple influence: folk. His latest album Unsung is in the latter category, though all of these except “Wait and See” are original songs by Bates. If anything, this album is stripped: the lion’s share of it is just Martyn and his guitar. It’s powerful singer/songwriter stuff from one of the most recognisable voices around, and there is a freshness in a lot of these songs that is remarkable given the ubiquity of the genre, as well as the fact that Bates has been making music for so long. That said, the strongest parallel is between this album and Bates’ solo albums around the year 1990, particularly the superb Letters to a Scattered Family. This new one is less bombastic, more subdued, and doesn’t immediately stand out when considered in the context of Bates’ œuvre. [...read more...]

Review: Ulaan Passerine (2013)

The name Ulaan Passerine didn’t immediately ring a bell, but once I found out that it’s a project by Steven R. Smith of Hala Strana (among others), things started falling into place. This is a man with a respected, if relatively obscure, musical history, who played a central role in establishing experimental folk sounds in the US since the late nineties. Even without that context, though, this new double tape on Brave Mysteries would have blown me away. These four pieces — each occupying a tape side of sixteen to eighteen minutes — are best classified as freefolk, but Smith has such a strong voice (figuratively speaking) that comparisons with other artists are practically useless to draw. [...read more...]

May 2013 Short Reviews (Lamia Vox, Saåad, Yellow6 & David Newlyn)

This here seal of the devil is one of those albums that I enjoy because one track grips me in particular, and that is the utterly majestic opener “Born from the Abyss”. It is a velvety layer cake of misty chants and deep, warm synths that perfectly recalls the heyday of Scandinavian dark ambient, roughly fifteen years ago. Certainly not out of place on a label like Cyclic Law, that’s for sure. The rest of this album, the work of St. Petersburg resident Alina Antonova, is nothing to scoff at either, but it is definitely a mood piece, a nostalgic amalgam of ethereal, darkwave, ritual, and ambient influences that epitomises goth atmosphere to me personally. It’s a fairly consistent album, but the best is at the start. Still, Sigillum Diaboli will be required fare for some of you, a dark work somewhere between raison d’être, Coph Nia, Arcana, and more recently, Rose Croix. [...read more...]

Review: Sangre de Muerdago – Deixademe Morrer no Bosque (2013)

Like last year’s tape on Brave Mysteries, this new full length by the currently Germany-based Sangre de Muerdago is an excellent reminder of what is great about neofolk. Though mostly devoid of the psychedelic trappings of some artists we’ve admired through the years, the band does weld together a number of different local sounds, with elements taken from various European areal styles, and perhaps a bit of US neofolk as well. This is a subtle difference from the previous release, which I classified as mostly typically German. It might be me, but I think I can hear a few more diverse threads picked up here. [...read more...]

Review: Witxes – A Fabric of Beliefs (2013)

Witxes’ debut album Sorcery/Geography almost made it to our list of last year’s favourite releases, and now, after not too long a wait, we’re treated to a strong follow-up album. It’s the first release on new label Denovali, and it coincides with a rerelease of the first album bearing the same new imprint. In short: that’s two double LPs worth picking up. A Fabric of Beliefs starts off a bit slow, perhaps, with the tripartite “Through Abraxas”, but these tracks do show that composer Maxime Vavasseur still has a firm grip on his electronics, drones, and some chugging rock parts. The buildup is very good, and it works towards a pretty dark climax, which is beautifully offset by the bright and shimmering acoustic guitar of “The Strands”. [...read more...]