OCHRE
Like Dust Of The Balance
BEN048
Benbecula Records 2009
10 Tracks. 47mins52secs

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Hailing from Newcastle, Chris Leary has been distilling his fine melodic electronica with parsimony over the years. While he first began making a name for himself after winning a remix competition held by Global Goon back in 2002, his first album, A Midsummer Nice Dream, was published two years later on London’s recently resurrected Toytronic. After the demise of the label that same year, Orchre reappeared on Scotland’s Benbecula in 2006 with his second album, Lemodie, on which Leary combined electronic and acoustic into a particularly ambitious soundtrack. Since, he has worked on an installation for the AV Festival in Newcastle, and has released two further EPs.

The fruit of three years of recordings, Like Dust Of The Balance represents a considerable progression from Lemodie. While Leary continues to explore the possibilities of bringing electronic and acoustic instrumentation together, there is on this album, even more so than on its predecessor, a great symbiosis of sound and ambience. Continue Reading »

OCHRE
Lemodie
BEN034CD
Benbecula Records 2006
10 Tracks. 57mins15secs

Chris Leary first got noticed with his debut EP, Sound System Bangers Vol. 1, in 2003, yet he had spent the previous few years freely distributing his music on the Internet and on CDrs. This led him to work on a series of remixes for artists such as Rusuden or Melodium, while his own tracks regularly got picked up to be featured on various compilations. His debut album, A Midsummer Nice Dream, published two years ago on London-based Toytronic, collected tracks created over a long period of time, but this sophomore effort is the fruit of a much more focused gestative process. Continue Reading »