SIMON SCOTT
Bunny
MIA017
Miasmah Recordings  2011
08 Tracks. 40mins23secs

Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD US: CD | LP | DLD Boomkat: CD | LP | DLD iTunes: DLD

Two years on from his stunning debut album, Navigare, Simon Scott returns to Erik Skodvin’s Miasmah with a much more ambitious follow up, where he revives some elements of the shoegaze he helped map out as a member of Slowdive nearly two decades ago, and weaves them together with atmospheric late night jazz and decaying ambient sequences.

Following his departure from Slowdive, after the band’s seminal second album, Souvlaki, Scott went on to perform with Lowgold for a while and later on formed Seavault, with ISAN’s Antony Ryan, and Televise, under which banner he released a number of albums between 2005 and 2008. Navigare represents however a watershed in Scott’s career as he finally stepped out in the limelights and fully assumed his position as a solo artist. Since, he has published a number of mini albums and EPs on Secret Furry Hole, Slaapwel or Sonic Pieces, and collaborated with Jasper TX’s Dag Rosenqvist on the soundtrack to Juriaan Booij’s short film Conformists, and The Sight Below on It All Falls Apart, published last year.

Like its predecessor, Bunny is a haunting and vibrant piece of work, but here, Scott steps away from the stark ambiences he explored on Navigare to investigate a much wider cross section of moods and sounds. Despite being only three and a half minute long, opening piece AC Waters, is a particularly ambitious piece; delicate guitar brushes, bowed cello, plucked double bass and textured electronics are clustered into sensory components to form a vast evocative soundscape. This sets the tone for the rest of the record. From there on, Scott alternates between similarly murky moments (the first half of Labano, Black Western Lights, the end part of Honeymoon, Gamma) and heavily hazed guitar-led pieces (Betty, the second half of Labano, Radiance, Drilla) which will undoubtedly hit a chord with shoegaze nostalgics.

Scott carves here a series of extremely effective and powerful moods, and applies them in subtle sonic layers. On the opening moments of Labano, a muffled piano floats above a distant bed of electric tension, while processed electric guitars create a dissonant drone on Black Western Lights before decay weakens it until it entirely disintegrate. On Gamma, the gloomy toll of a single piano note, at times echoed by a double bass, icily pulses over fragments of slide guitar and cello. Similar atmospheric sprawls can be found on the slow burning guitar pieces, but, buried under layers of distortions and reverbs, they lurk in the background and are not instantly noticeable, yet this is where they are the most devastating.

With each new record, Simon Scott has altered his path slightly to deflect expectations. He does so here in quite a perverse way, bringing back hazy guitars and vast reverbs when he appeared to have left them behind for good, and integrating them into his refined electronics. Here, he has widened his scope greatly, but has retained the core of his dense soundscaping to create a stunning follow up to his impressive debut.

4.5/5

Simon Scott | Simon Scott (MySpace) | Miasmah Recordings
Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD US: CD | LP | DLD Boomkat: CD | LP | DLD iTunes: DLD