NEED MORE SOURCES: Shed (Moteer)

By

Posted on Jul 30th 2007 12:56 pm

Filed in Albums | Tags: ,
Comments (0)

Shed

Need More Sources
Shed
MOTEER012
Moteer 2007
10 Tracks. 54mins29secs

Chris Stewart strokes sounds from piano, guitar and a string quartet, and sows them into ambitiously lengthy pieces and dense multitracked constructions. Lyrical passages of violin batter at a sepulchral fog like a moth at a bulb, acting as the driving force behind most compositions. This core is dressed in simple yet largely effective abstract color patterns, making for bruised instrumentals marked by moments of atmospheric aural illusion.

Album opener, Morning takes place within a crystalline, combustible horizon, against which scenes of fidgety strings and one-note piano lines stand out, occasionally resulting in syncretic peaks, but more often than not simply waiting for the interaction to reach its natural endpoint before weaving in new elements. On occasion this approach means that the amount of time spent laboring over the development of an idea is disproportionate to its value. To begin, Breeze lingers too long in an eldritch ambience that never truly takes hold. Spring, on the other hand, hinges upon rustic, restrained guitar picking haunted by analogue burbles and accordion murmur, and quickly becomes a fine amalgam of cosmic ambition and the garden shed; but when kick-drums come crashing in at the five-minute mark, it is carried well beyond its own ends.

The album nevertheless achieves a smooth transition away from the distant, ghostly arrangements of the first few tracks and into more sprightly, pastoral plains. At times, Stewart even moves these two domains into the same nebula, where they effectively pulse at the mouth while simultaneously managing a shape-shifting bloom of melody. Case and point, Valley is inhabited by a gentle and evanescent piano motif over which looms a rainbow cloud of upper partials. At first, shivering violin lines are shadowed by musical phantoms and chattering tape, yet autumnal guitar patterns open up a breathing space in which ramshackle drums implant a natural unevenness from which there is no escape for the rest of the piece. It’s not an arresting atmosphere, but with his first effort, Stewart realizes an intimate, joyous form of classical music spawned from the bedroom or shed, as the case may be.

arrow Explore: Moteer
arrow Buy: CD

Filed in Albums | Tags: ,
Comments (0)

Comments are closed.