An experimental instrumental offshoot from Foglake mastermind Aaron Powell – this absolute beauty came into the world a few years back and for some god-forsaken reason missed me entirely. I am so glad to have found it now though as it almost unsettlingly blurs in strange ways like the sounds that already fill my head – notes warbling like fragments of dreams, every corner filled with moments that waver like a half-remembered dream; somehow, finding these songs a few years later feels apt as this is music that’s wrapped in memory; it feels like an old photograph found in the attic, it feels like something lost, and you as listener blessed to have found it. It’s everything I love about music.
I’m reminded at times of the instrumental sections of early Daniel Johnston tapes – Songs of Pain-evoking piano notes undulating with tape frayed tremolo – but also something older too… parlour music – the home recordings of Molly Drake- it sounds like a beautiful ghost playing an old piano in a locked room to which you’ve lost the key- but those glorious notes still reach your ears from beneath the door – painting hopeful and dreamlike shapes in your waking brain. It’s utterly mesmerising.
Deliberately lofi in production- you can hear the tape whirring – bending notes in wonderfully nostalgia-evoking ways with occasional production manipulation pushing those vibrations further still- like the lost soundtrack to some early Soviet children’s animation. And it really does feel like something lost and that, as I’ve said, is part of the wonder of the listening experience – that feeling of listening to something once precious, something saved, and something now found. It’s an astonishing thing – that these simple compositions can carry such emotional weight through the power of associations – memory’s inherent, intrinsic ability to link with the world of sound, and sound’s ability to tap into concepts of memory (both real and imagined). Aaron Powell has captured that magic here.
I have deliberately chosen to not mention specific tracks- as this, I feel, is music that should be absorbed as one. I could listen to these sounds forever. In fact, I may do just that…
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
Music | Misophone (bandcamp.com)
