I
first began listening to John Foxx’s music just
after he ended his three-album tenure as leader of Ultravox.
I went halves on these albums (the eponymous debut,
Ha!-Ha!-Ha! and Systems Of Romance)
with my best friend and we took possession on alternate
fortnights of the vinyl album. I still know all the
lyrics off by heart, but lost track of Foxx’s
solo career after 1985’s In Mysterious Ways.
Cathedral Oceans is the first time I’ve
heard this latest stage of Foxx’s career, apart
from witnessing a guest appearance at his friend, Harold
Budd’s farewell concert in Brighton last year.
Cathedral Oceans III can trace its lineage
back to a track on Foxx’s second solo album, The
Garden: Pater Noster was a setting of
a Latin mass to a disco beat and was far more successful
than such a description might suggest. With titles such
as City Of Endless Stairways, Serene Velocity
and Through Gardens Overgrown, it would be
hard to envisage music that was anything other than
ethereal and haunting. In its stilled atmospheres and
sense of vast, reverberating spaces, Cathedral Oceans
III also suggests echoes of Just For A Moment,
the concluding track on Ultravox’s final, Foxx-helmed
album, Systems Of Romance. That piece centred
upon an unexpected moment of disjunction, balanced on
either side by a sense of wondering otherness.
Beatless and spectral though it is, Cathedral Oceans
III is not ambient in the traditional sense. There’s
too great a sense of the melodic, as though each song
were a cloud of pollen or a distilled essence that’s
been alchemically siphoned from an original, less fluid
structure. John Foxx has in the past steered clear of
reference to any specific religious belief, preferring
instead to talk of the wonder of the artistic impulse
in the experience of church architecture, but the depth
of the references here makes me wonder whether he has
discovered some form of faith now. Whether or not that’s
the case, Foxx shares with Harold Budd (and Brian Eno)
an unabashed love of the musically beautiful. Here is
the wistful breath, the early morning mist, the transfiguring
sunset. For this listener, it feels like a homecoming.
Colin Buttimer
4/5 |
