I've avoided Christmas music here this year largely but today I thought I'd treat you to an ambient mix for Christmas Eve. I said last week that for me ambient music and found sounds do carry a very wintry and Christmassy feel- the half heard conversations and hum of background noise of shops and pubs, bells and drones, and the constant half dusk of December. This mix is all of that, mostly ambient, and a little bit more.
Pandit Pam Pam: Equipe Exploratoria Papai Natal III
Pye Corner Audio: Get Thee Behind Me Santa
Pye Corner Audio releases new music onto his Bandcamp page monthly, ambient/ drone/ acid tracks that are free/ pay what you want. Martyn Jenkins (Mr Pye Corner Audio) has recorded four Christmas tracks, all included in this mix, the opening three forming a long slow ambient fade in and the fourth a long slow drone fade out. It's worth noting that Omnichord Omnishambles was PCA's Christmas 2020 track, the omnishambles being a reference to the then chaotic government of Boris Johnson and the bewildering, populist, bullshit decision making of the government during Covid and Christmas in 2020.
Durutti Column's One Christmas For Your Thoughts is from 1981 and a compilation called Chansons Noel on Crepescule (along with other early 80s post- punk heroes such as Aztec Camera, Paul Haig, Simon Topping and Cabaret Voltaire). Vini and his guitar never sounded better.
Saint Etienne's Xmas 2021 EP was a four track CD only release that followed hot on the heels of their I've Been Trying To Tell You album. Lillehammer is a gorgeous wintry instrumental, named after the Norwegian ski resort which hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics. The lead song on the single was Her Winter Coat, Pete and Bob's music a low key, mini- winter epic, synths and sleigh bells, and Sarah in spoken word mode.
The Vendetta Suite is Gary Irwin from Belfast, a veteran of the city's acid house scene. In 2021 he released an album called The Kempe Stone Portal with Christmas In Cologne on it, a song that first appeared in 2019's The Wheel Turns EP. Cosmische Christmas.
Pandit Pam Pam is from Sao Paulo, Brazil. He released an album this year which should have made yesterday's list and an EP that did, plus his third Christmas release. The Natal III EP also contains a ten minute long track that should have been on this mix but I wanted to keep it to forty minutes, the brilliantly titled Santa Crying And Depressed On 26th Because He Is Concerned About The Coming Years, As He Is Technically An Illegal Immigrant And The Political Landscape Is Changing. You can find that here.
The end of year list is a bit of an indulgence but also a good way to look back, revisit albums and songs and enjoy again the music that's made my year. People like lists. The exact positions are very arbitrary. What does it matter if I think something was the 26th or 27th best album of the year? It doesn't. But pulling together my favourite releases of the calendar year is always a fun thing to do and a good way to draw a line under the year. Last year I wrote a massive piece with multiple sections, categories, sub- categories and sub- lists, the total number of releases heading up towards three figures. I must have had more time to think about it and to write it last year than I do now. This year I've slim- lined it to two lists, one for albums and one for singles/ EPs/ remixes, each numbering thirty.
Some years feel like singles years and some feel like album years- 2024 has been a big year for albums, some big hitters and 80s/ 90s bands and artists with big comebacks. I like to think I keep up with new music to some extent and the number of 'old' artists in this list makes me wonder how accurate that is, whether I'm kidding myself about that. But, as they say, it is what it is. Inevitably I will have missed something out from one of these two lists, if not both. Equally inevitably, I will buy an album in the new year that came out in 2024 which should have been in the top 30. Nothing is ever fixed. Maybe that's the way it should be, a constantly fluid and shifting list.
Singles, EPs and remixes
30 Silvertooth: Shut Um Down (A Dub From Outer Space)
29 The Liminanas and Bertand Belin: J'Adore Le Monde
28 Richard Norris: Weatherall's Last Stand
27 Jezebell: Weekend Machines EP
26 Causeway: Dancing With Shadows
25 Hinds with Grian Chatten: Stranger
24 David Harrow and Hugo Nicolson: Revolvalution EP and Rude Audio Remixes
23 Cole Odin and Marshall Watson: Voyager
22 Mick Harvey: When We Were Beautiful And Young
21 Electric Blue Vision: Trance Stance
20 BTCOP: The Custom 88 EP and Rude Audio Remixes
19 Mildlife: Return To Centauri
18 Puerto Montt City Orchestra: Hey You (10:40 Remix)
17 Pandit Pam Pam: Pass A Wish EP
16 Theis Thaws: Fly To Ceiling (David Holmes Remix)
15 Ammomite: You Don't Know Me (David Holmes Remix)
14 Ride: Last Frontier
13 C.A.R.: Anzu (Hardway Bros Remixes)
12 Acid Klaus: PTSD By Proxy EP
11 Raxon: Your Fault
10 Peak High: Dance Hall Days
9 Psychederek: Alt! EP
8 Iraini Mancini: Undo The Blue (Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Re- animation)
7 Lisa Moorish: Sylvia (David Holmes Remix)
6 A Certain Ratio: It All Comes Down To This
5 Galliano: Cabin Fever Dub
A limited edition 7" single that was a very timely release with its line, 'don't want to take my country back man/ Want to take my country forwards', arriving to coincide with the Farage race riots in the summer, Galliano making a return to action and being a voice of reason. The song sampled Andrew Weatherall's remix of the band from 1992's Skunk Funk and borrowed Joe Strummer's vocal phrasings from This Is Radio Clash, and was a very unexpected treat.
4 Amyl and The Sniffers: Big Dreams
As was this, a single ahead of the Melbourne pub punk's third album that showed a different side to the band. Over a picked, circling guitar riff and some spacious production Amy sang a punk rock torch song for all those people stuck in dead end towns and dead end jobs amid a cost of living crisis who want to get out and realise they're another year older and still stuck. The video for Big Dreams, with the band on motorbikes in the desert, was pure rock 'n' roll cool.
3 Alex Kassian: E2- E4 (A Reference To E2- E4 By Manuel Gottsching)/ Mad Professor remixes
Twelve minutes and twenty one seconds of perfection- pulsing spaced out synths lines that lit up the summer. Not that summer really happened in the north of the UK this year. But when E2- E4 played it felt like it did.
2 Orbital, David Holmes, DJ Helen and Mike Garry: Tonight In Belfast
Tonight In Belfast, Mike Garry's beautifully moving poem and voice over David Holmes' remix of Orbital's Belfast, a re- imagining of the Hartnoll brothers 1991 masterpiece is as good as anything else released this yea. It could easily be my number one. David remixed Belfast for the Orbital 30 project, updating it for the 2020s. DJ Helen got Mike Garry to speak his Tonight poem over the top. Mike's words speak to me in all sorts of ways. When I first heard it, so many of the lines for me were about Isaac, it seemed almost like he'd written it for me. Transcendent and emotional, everything music can/ should be. Magical.
'Tonight I want to paint pictures of you/ Write poems and songs and novels all about you/I wanna hold you up so high you're gonna need a spacesuit'
'I love to speak your name aloud/ Simply 'cos I love its sound/ It feels like I'm kinda calling yer/ It feels like I'm kinda talking to ya/ It feels like I'm trying to break through/ You know across this divide'
'I'll tell you what/ Let's slip beyond the confines of this world/Let's forget every single thing we've learned/ Let's rewrite the way this world can turn'
1 Fat White Family: Bullet Of Dignity (Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Re- Animation)
This came out in June, a 12" remix of one of the songs from Fat White Family's latest album Forgiveness Is Yours. The Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve Remix takes Bullet Of Dignity, already a fucked up, sordid and groovy number and spins it further, kicking off with percussion, timbales, early 90s kick drum and then a squelchy bassline that oozes dance floor action. It builds, echoes rattling around and the rhythm gathering steam, some piano stabs and then finally, after a drop out and pause, Lias' vocal comes in, a blur of standout lines and attention grabbing phrases- 'You say you're just thirty one/ What's that in cannibal years?' I have no idea what it's about but it keeps giving with imagery, lines about fatal caricatures and suicidal cassettes, words walking in pairs, and how the dialogue's dubbed. There's a Middle Eastern/ North African guitar line that appears and re- appears. At five minutes it takes off even further, the groove and rhythms bouncing around, moving ever forwards.
There are a couple of singles that should really be heading up the singles list but they're both going to appear as part of the albums near the top end of this second list, as much for variety as anything.
Albums
Edit: I've forgotten to include any of 100 Poems brilliant trio of albums from this year- I knew I'd forget something! Out of the three the most recent, Balearic As A System Of Belief, just about edges it. Album number 31.
30 The Jesus And Mary Chain: Glasgow Eyes
29 Fat White Family: Forgiveness Is Yours
28 Reverb Delay: The Storm Has Passed
27 SubDan: Inhale, Exhale, Repeat
26 Duncan Gray: Five Fathoms Full
25 Saint Etienne: The Night
24 Richard Norris: Oracle Sound Volume Three
23 Khruangbin: A La Sala
22 Mick Head and The Red Elastic Band: Loophole
21 The Woodentops: Fruits Of the Deep
20 Dirt Bogarde: Love, Sweat And Beers
19 M- Paths: Submerge
18 Coyote: Hurry Up And Live
17 Klangkollektor: Dub Tapes Volume 1
16 Various Artists: Virtual Dreams Volume II (Ambient Explorations In The House And techno Age, Japan 1993- 1999
15 David Holmes: Blind On A Galloping Horse Remixes
14 Fontaines DC: Romance
13 Richard Sen: India Man
12 A Certain Ratio: It All Comes Down To This
11 J- Walk: Broken Beauty
10 Five Green Moons: Moon One
9 Sedibus: Seti
8 Underworld: Strawberry Hotel
7 Four Tet: 3
6 Jamie Xx: In Waves
5 The Cure: Songs Of A Lost World
I had no idea, along with thousands of other people I imagine, that what I really needed in late 2024 was a new album from The Cure. The opener, Alone, released as a single in the autumn, was an exercise in majestic beauty and beautiful gloom, a three minute instrumental intro and then Robert Smith singing as well as he ever has, about life, love, loss, mortality, and 'the end of every song we sing'. Stunning. The album continued in that vein for the next seven songs, meditations on aging and loss, ending inevitably with Endsong.
4 GLOK/ Timothy Clerkin: Alliance
Electronics and guitars, swirling, woozy modern psychedelia recorded remotely after the pair met at Andrew Weatherall's funeral. A collision of early 90s sounds and 2024 trippiness. For some time it was all I played, a totally addictive seven track album.
3 Bill Ryder- Jones: Iechyd Da
This could easily be album of the year, a January release that I keep returning to. Beautiful songs with acoustic guitars, pianos and grand, sweeping strings, a children's choir from a Birkenhead primary school, Mick Head reading Ulysses, a Gal Costa sample, and amazing stirring production- and then Bill's battered and beaten voice, sounding like a man who's reached the end of the road, has nowhere left to go, broken. The pain he sings about is from experience, the death of his brother as a child (Daniel fell off a cliff while they pair where on holiday, his family forever scarred) and mental health issues ever since.
In the end though he gets there and we do with him- 'I'm still lost/ But I know love/ I know loss/ But I chose love'.
2 Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: Wild God
Wild God was a step into the light, a conscious decision by Nick Cave to choose joy over sorrow- a line that appears in the song Joy where Nick is visited late at night by a ghost, a boy with giant sneakers and laughing stars around his head, who tells him, 'we've all had too much sorrow/ now is the time for joy'. It shakes me when I hear it.
By this song, the fourth on the album, its clear we've stepped into a new Cave world. The first song, Song Of The Lake, explodes orchestrally Nick muttering 'never mind, never mind...'. It's follow by Wild God, with its heart stopping cry of 'bring your spirit down'. That is followed by Frogs, easily one of the best songs of this year and one of Cave's best, a song where Nick walks home on a Sunday in the rain, amazed at the wonders of the world around him- frogs in the gutter, the rain, Kris Kristofferson. The band sound reborn too. The previous albums were so grief stricken and spectral it was difficult for them to find a way in, Warren Ellis's synths were the core of the sound. Final Rescue Attempt tells of Nick being saved by a woman, and how after that, 'nothing really hurt again/ nothing ever really hurt/ not even real pain'. It's extraordinary stuff, magical, life affirming songs. By the end of side two, when former partner Anita Lane's voice appears (from Nick's answer phone. She died in 2021), we've gone through the wringer and come out the other side, the sheer joie de vivre evident throughout, no more so than in the fade out to Conversion where Nick and the choir sing/ shout, 'Stop! You're beautiful!', at each other.
Both Frogs and Wild God could have been near the top end of the singles list- I've not listened to any songs more than either of those two all year- but now they're fully part of the album as a whole, an album that when I put it on, I play all the way through and one I imagine I'll still be playing long into the future.
1 Various Artists: Sounds From The Flightpath Estate
What else could it be? I did wonder whether I could/ should put the album me, Martin, Dan, Mark and Baz pulled together into my list, if doing it was a bit much. But in the end, it has been the album of the year for me. This time last year we were receiving tracks from the artists we'd approached, music from Justin Robertson, David Holmes, Timothy J Fairplay, Richard Sen, Hardway Bros, Sons Of Slough, Rude Audio and 10:40. Andy Bell's cover of Smokebelch arriving at the last minute was the cherry on top. An unreleased Two Lone Swordsmen track too.
We knew we had something good, all the music was so strong, everyone had really responded so well to us (a bunch of unknowns let's be honest). But we did not expect what then happened. Selling out 500 vinyl copies in a day. Repressing 500 more and selling all of them too. Three of the tracks being played on Lauren Laverne's 6 Music show. Having the window display in Piccadilly Records.
Giving a copy to Paul Simonon at The Golden Lion was as memorable and surreal as anything else that happened in 2024. Appearing in two end of year lists (Piccadilly records and Uncut). All of it has been unreal and yet, there it is, it happened. It would have been nothing without the music though- from the chunky cosmic chug of Sons Of Slough (recorded live at The Golden Lion) to Tim Fairplay's centurion dub, Justin's weird folk/ dub collision and Richard Sen's massive sounding Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug, the dub techno of Rude Audio and 10:40's fairground swirl, Hardway Bros writing our own theme, Theme For Flightpath Estate, and Holmes' magnificent Human: Remains, to Andy's gorgeous cover of Smokebelch, it's a brilliant and beautiful thing and it's my album of the year. To everyone involved, all the artists, my Flightpath friends, Waka, Gig and Matt at the Golden Lion and GLS, Andrew Liles, Rusty for his incredible sleeve art, and the memory of Andrew Weatherall (for whom it is a tribute)- thank you.
On Saturday 6th December The Flightpath Estate DJ team were fortunate enough to be playing support to David Holmes, another excursion to The Golden Lion in Todmorden. On this occasion the team was myself, Martin and Dan, starting out at 3pm and going through until 9pm when David took over. We took i tin turns playing in batches of threes (occasionally fours, sometimes twos and as time ticked on one on, one off). We never take this for granted and are genuinely honoured and grateful to be asked to play. The pub started to fill up late afternoon and we had an audience by the time evening arrived. The set wasn't recorded live but we've done our best to recreate it (copious note making while DJing by some, working from memory by others) and you can listen to the full six hours and eleven minutes at Mixcloud.
If I do say so myself, I think we played some pretty good records and sequenced them pretty well too. The tracklist is below, a set that starts out with The Pogues and ends six hours later with Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve's remix of Ulysses by Franz Ferdinand, a track that David smothered in dub effects and slowed right down so he could take over. Later on he was joined by Michelle McKenzie and the pair took the roof off- David always does at The Lion.
Adam
[0:00] The Pogues - Summer In Siam
[5:00] Arthur Russell - In The Light Of The Miracle
[18:00] World Of Twist - She’s A Rainbow
[22:00] Planet 4 Folk Quartet - Message To Crommie
Dan
[25:00] Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart (A Mix Of Two Halves)
[34:00] Hoodie x James K - Scorpio
[41:00] Sault - We Are Gods
Martin
[46:00] Saiko Tsukamoto - Higher Than The Sun (Being Borings Remix Demo)
[51:00] Minotaur Shock - It All Levels Out
[56:00] Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman - Communal Imagination
Adam
[59:00] Klangkollektor - Midnight Express
[1:05:00] Lark - Can I Colour In Your Hair (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
[1:09:00] Electric Blue Vision - Other Skies (Hardway Bros Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
Dan
[1:16:00] Andrew Weatherall - Youth Ozone Machine
[1:20:00] Autumns - Purely Reasonable
[1:23:00] Bill Laswell - Nonmatter
Martin
[1:27:00] Boozoo Bajou - Re-Tuff
[1:29:00] Coreysan - Heavy Load (Nina Walsh Remix)
[1:36:00] Antoni Maiovvi - Glyph
Adam
[1:39:00] Five Green Moons - Spider Dub
[1:44:00] Totem Edits - 12 Feel
[1:51:00] Coyote - Habitual Illusions
Dan
[1:56:00] Bill Frisell - 1968
[2:00:00] David Holmes - Rodney Yates
[2:06:00] Frankie & The Heartstrings - Fragile
Martin
[2:12:00] Subway - Persuasion
[2:18:00] DJ Oil - Addis
[2:25:00] The Aloof - Never Get Out The Boat (The Flying Remix)
Adam
[2:31:00] Grinderman- Palaces Of Montezuma
[2:34:00] Fontaines D.C.- ‘Cello Song
[2:39:00] Spacemen 3- Big City (Everybody I Know Can Be Found Here)
{Dan}
[2:49:00] Scientists Of Sound - Step On Stage (Underdog Remix Instrumental)
[2:54:00] Bootman - To The Hip
[2:59:00] Rek Shit Rebulz - Bounce (To The Beat)
[3:01:00] Bedford Falls Players - Cosmosapien Revisited (The Long Champs Remix)
The 21st December is the winter solstice. After today, it starts getting a little lighter every day. It may not be noticeable tomorrow but in a month or two it will. Something that is always worth noting I think.
In 2006 Rough Trade celebrated a significant birthday by releasing a double CD compilation titled The Record Shop: 30 Years Of Rough Trade Shops. Across the two CDs, packaged in an expensive looking hardback book complete with dust cover and sixty pages of text and photos, were a wide range of leftfield and alternative music- thirty songs chosen by thirty different Rough Trade and adjacent people, from Geoff Travis to james Murphy, Daniel Miller and Seymour Stein to Jon Savage, Bjork and Jeff Barrett. Bobby Gillespie, Thurston Moore, Jarvis Cocker, Stewart Lee, Ana Da Silva and Erol Alkan all get selections, as Rough Trade punters. In the book it says that the selectors are all Rough Trade customers, and asked to choose a favourite record from the 30 years before 2006 and a memory or tale to go with it. As a result, it's wildly inconsistent as a listen but great fun and does actually sound like what a proper record shop staffed by obsessives could sound like on a busy Saturday if everyone got one go on the instore stereo.
The songs include late 70s punk cuts from The Modern Lovers, Swell Maps, The Mekons, Blue Orchids and The Rezillos, 80s indie from Mighty Mighty, Bongwater and Pixies, 90s alt from Bikin Kill, Stereoloab and Matmos and 00s randoms such as SchneiderTM vs Kpt. Michi. Gan's cover of The Smihths, The Carter Family and James Luther Dickinson and LCD Soundsystem. I've cherry picked four tracks, two from each disc, more or less randomly with two artists who have never appeared at Bagging Area before.
Holger Czukay's Persian Love is from 1979 and was chosen by Don Letts. The Can man is in fine form on this track, sampling Iranian singers from short wave radio while his bass bumps along underneath, with a guitar line and some percussion. It's all rather lovely and sounds very contemporary, it could easily be slipped into an afternoon DJ set.
Erol Alkan picked The Power Of Lard by Lard, a 1988 song from Ministry's Al Jourgenson with Paul Barker and Jeff Ward. Late 80s US Industrial rock that hit deep with the skateboarding crowd.
Gary Walker, the founder of Wiija Records, chose Bikini Kill's Capri Pants, a song that first appeared in the 1996 as a US import single, a period when punk was revitalised and kicking in all directions. Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill sound cool as fuck on Capri Pants, buzzsaw guitars, crashing cymbals and white hot vocals.
Lastly, Jeff Barratt's choice. As founder of Heavenly Records Jeff knows his musical onions and he plumped for Karen Dalton and a 1969 song re- issued in 1997, folk blues of the sort that, as Jeff says in the sleeve notes, 'you ain't never going to hear on the radio- word of mouth is the only way'. Word of mouth and record shops.
Let's end the working week, the last full week before the Christmas holiday, and the end of the school term with some more new music- both electronic but with a world of difference between them. First is a track from M- Paths who I first encountered at Mighty Force, with a really impressive pair of albums. This new one is self- released, a four minute burst of Aphex Twin inspired ambient electro/ techno called Shapes and Patterns that has rapid, rattling drums, dancing synths and repetitive melodic passages interrupted by bursts of bass, the music never settling for long but constantly twisting and turning.
Out today on the ever wonderful Tici Taci is a new EP from Jack Butters, an original called Floor Burner and a pair of remixes. The vocal sample, 'I think it's time to make the floor burn', should leave no one in any doubt about why this track exists. Drums and synths judder and chug, the bassline descends, wobbly FX fire off all over the place.
The remixes come from Rule Six and The Time Machine Drop Outs. Rule Six go for the low slung, slow burn, the bassline pumping on as the synths and FX glitter around it. Time Machine Drop Outs are Matt Gunn (see yesterday's post) and Chad Jackson (of the Hacienda and hearing drummers getting wicked among other things). The tempo is low, the guitar is funky, the floor is burned.
Matt Gunn has appeared here before but in leftfield electronic/ cosmic chug/ psychedelic dub disco mode. In his youth Matt played in guitar bands and it turns out there are occasions when the rock 'n' roll juices flow, the guitars get plugged in, the amps turned up and jams are kicked out. Last Friday Matt unleashed an album as The Matt Gunn Band into the festive hell of mid- December, an eight song slice of, as he puts it, 'songs about stuff using real instruments first, then tech', an album called Another Pleasant Valley Death Cult. The title alone should give you some idea of what to expect.
Ego To Go Go kicks in with a drummer counting us in and then raw and dirty fuzz bass, psyche rock guitar chords, summer of '69 vibes, ah ah ah backing vocals and then growly lead vox. The kind of guitar rock that 00s bands inspired by the Mary Chain made- Crocodiles and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club both spring to mind. Different League is funked up indie with a killer bassline. What Do You Think Of Me Now? channels The Cramps- in fact, Lux and Poison Ivy are never far away on Another Pleasant Valley Death Cult- but with 70s punk vocals. Testing One Two is looser and more experimental, more post- punk. Crushed comes in with a repeating organ riff, then crunchy drums and an indie dance feel, recalling both That Petrol Emotion and Big Audio Dynamite, if they'd come from Windsor. Infiltrator starts with synths, the sort of sound Matt produces more usually, but then diverts with a driving, propulsive throbbing bass, FXed vocals and a surf guitar solo. Full Of Lies is slowed down, the dub influences seeping in, FX and bleeps, the guitars not turning up until a couple of minutes in. Another Pleasant Valley Death Cult finishes with Shock Value, an eight minute epic, again riding in on synths and then a sneered vocal, 'take this...', as the bass and drums crunch about. Matt sings of AC/ DC and voltage running through him. The psyched out section, backwards guitars over thumping drums, is a joy, the song switching back and forth and then building for the last few minutes, guitars, synths, FX, drums, throbbing bass, a hefty dose of the experimental early 90s indie/ guitar bands fed through dance remixes and producers reconstituted for late 2024. You can listen and buy at Bandcamp.
Not long ago Matt released some cosmic chug for Tici Taci, a three track EP called The Ringmakers Of Saturn. I wrote about it here- and need no excuse to repost this Simon Sheldon and Monkton remix, a wonderful piece of skanking sci fi dub.
There's something about this time of year, the long slow fade through November and December towards Christmas that particularly lends itself to ambient music and found sounds. The fact that it's almost permanently half light, seemingly always either dark or dusk, the constant hubbub of half heard sounds of shoppers, radio, conversations, and the jangling, ambient- esque festive noises of bells and choirs, give the end of the year an ambient feel. The new Saint Etienne album, The Night, dropped onto my door mat this week and is sweetly timed, an album of street noises, slow drifting synths, and Sarah's spoken word songs and lists, the sound of bedding in as the sun goes down at 4pm. This EP, Astoria, by former- Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie came out at the star of November but I only heard it recently and it fits in to mid- December perfectly, four slices of ambient dream pop. Opener A Most Remarkable Woman is short, just two and a half minutes, washes of synth and a bassline and then suddenly Robin's guitar, that chiming/ breaking glass sound he conjures ending almost as swiftly as it started.
The three that follow are cut from similar cloth. Starting Fires is glacial and stately, drums giving it a push behind the cinematic, winterscape guitars and synths. Third track Jura is the longest on the EP, over four minutes of calming sounds, layers of ambience- a few minutes of calm at a time of year when its often the exact opposite. In 1986 The Cocteau twins collaborated with ambient/ minimalist Harold Budd, The Moon And The Melodies, an album that has only grown in stature since its release. Jura nods back in that records direction, synth shimmer and slow motion chord changes, a blissed out balm. Astoria closes with Smoulder which swells into earshot with piano over an ambient backdrop, layers of sounds and warm drones building- the piano edges forward and eventually drums thump in. Smoulder reminds me of Mark Peters' Innerland album of 2017, an ambient/ guitar album specifically about place (north west England), a similar blend of guitars, synths and drums, forming pictures of landscapes and winter, time and place. Robin recorded Astoria in France, in Brittany, where he's lived for a long time now. You can get Astoria here, on both digital and CD.
