CLEM LEEK
Holly Lane
HB19
Hibernate Recordings 2010
08 Tracks. 42mins52secs

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

It’s been a rather busy year for young British musician and composer Clem Leek. In the space of just a few months, he’s had a number of releases coming out on Experimedia, Dead Pilot or his own imprint, Schedios. The latest in this flurry of releases, Holly Lane, is published on the excellent Hibernate Recordings in a limited run of just two hundred CDs, with an additional run of fifty also including an exclusive bonus three-inch CD.

A pianist with a recent MA in Music Composition, Leek expands on his instrument of predilection to incorporate a wealth of filed recordings, processed guitars and electronics. Holly Lane is a particularly haunting piece of work where all sounds and melodies are wrapped in layers of effects, their edges smoothed and blurred to the point where it is virtually impossible to identify for sure where any of them starts or ends, or what the sound sources are exactly. Continue Reading »

Located in the lively and cosmopolitan Shepherd’s Bush area, West London, a stone-throw from the cold and soulless Westfield shopping arcade, Bush Hall is like an oasis of calm and tranquility. The place has been many things over the years, from its original purpose as a ball room to a soup kitchen during the second World War, a snooker club in the seventies, before being returned to its former glory, complete with carved ceiling and chandeliers, in the nineties. It retains a level of intimacy which was perfectly suited to this evening’s performance from German musician and composer Volker Bertelmann, better known as Hauschka, who was kicking off his UK tour following the release of his recent album, Foreign Landscapes, on Fat Cat. For this performance, Bertelmann was accompanied by a twelve-piece ensemble, who, he informed us, due to the impossible logistic of taking a whole orchestra on tour, he only had met the day before for a rehearsal session, and was ‘feeling like speed dating’. Continue Reading »