|
Regular observers to these pages will be all to aware of our passing affection for the work of Jon Attwood AKA Yellow 6, his delicately crafted guitar based ambient signatures have been stationed beyond the parameters of perceived pop amid the voids of nothingness wherein lie the polar divides between the classical, the drone and the post rock disciplines of song craft.
Across a back catalogue numbering over 50 releases, Attwood has encapsulated and given a voice to the invisible worlds that exist in the inner space and simultaneously created for himself a uniquely hermetically sealed environment and aural micro universe, the trademark glassy textures in recent years have been broadened to adopt a filmic texture that sways and arcs with frosted passion and introspective isolation.
Recorded last year in Stockholm and utilising all manner of guitars, effects pedals and computer software ‘when the leaves fall like snow’ and self described as ‘quite minimal but not minimalist’ and ‘born out of the isolation of living 6 weeks in a foreign country’ it provides Atwood with his most accomplished and evocative work to date in so far as rather than the tracks sitting like individual snapshots this time of asking the collection heard overall flows, connects and relates to create rich symphonic landscape. A 2 disc set featuring over 2 and a half hours of lulling and lilting curvatures the first disc subtitled ‘fall’ features six extended instrumental suites while disc two - ‘further‘ is described in his own words as ‘the shorter ones tho’ not by a lot‘.
Combining the aching slow core artistry of early career Codeine enhanced by the strangely mournful warmth of Roy Montgomery, what strikes you about ’fall’ is its relative quietness, almost like a murmur the melodies meander majestically like skirting eddies across an arid landscape, part tender part hollowed, the softly tendered melodies are fractured by silent pauses endowing an almost respectful resonance especially on the opening cut ’still water’. All at once elegant and eerie these aural eulogies or rather more spectral memorials captivate and caress with solemn repose as though pining for something long since lost or signifying a moment captured frozen for all time. From the thawing ’street’ to the ghostly ‘katarinahissen’ Attwood’s starkly sparse applications are delicately threaded with an underlying depth of artistry, the slender signatures almost applied with the deftness of a key hole surgical exercise, the stillness and the silence aiding a touching resonance to the scores almost as though like a harmony of the elements, the latter mentioned track in particular with its subtle dusty arpeggios, the sounds escaping from within are not unlike the echoing embers of a long decided gun fight finale from a Morriconne western, the drifting sonic spectres seductively etching the stillness with their romantic reprises. Obviously a nod to early career godspeed you black emperor as is the crushing ‘tva’ with its brooding atmospherics and panoramic drone montages. ‘leaves fall like snow’ ushers in a momentarily lighter toned perspective recalling at moments a crystalline Robin Guthrie before retreating back for a spot of cavernous rustics for the sweetly shy eyed ‘street writing’.
Disc 2 - ‘further’ - features 10 compositions that more or less confirm and consolidate Attwood as one of the scenes leading exponents of mood evoking atmospherics. All the trademarks tricks are here providing a rich and varied aural canvas - from the statue-esque and radiant ‘moderna’; the meditative cavernous sculptures (‘all space’); the daintily treated frosted pastoral plateaus (as on the Barry meets Mancini numbed shimmer of ‘amateur’) to the pirouetting opines as on the ethereal and evocative shade wearing Gnac like ‘norwest passage’ with Attwood mercurially orchestrating the parched, the porcelain and the perfect. Highlights indeed reveal themselves in the guise of ‘you can’t be everywhere he said’ and ‘everything changes’ - the former a smoking dream-scaping haze of caressing curvatures scratched tenderly and bathed by fuzz shimmies the latter festooned in all manner of lunatic swirls of the bliss out chamber psyche grooves. File under cerebral chill out pop
www.makeminemusic.co.uk
Key tracks -
Katarinahissen
Tva
Everything changes
Magasin 2
Future releases / projects -
The UK based Distant Noise imprint will be releasing Yellow 6’s attentively titled ’STHLM’ (Stockholm we gather - clever buggers aren’t we)as part of their limited monthly CD-r series - three releases so far from Schengen, Luga and Televise - the latter already sold out at source (damn) and each limited to just 100 copies. www.luga.haveajoint.com
Iamstringsthattrembleunderabow (don’t ask us) is Attwood’s collaborative project with Dirk Series the fruits of which should see their way into the public domain this summer via Equation records - www.chronoglide.com/equation
Further collaborations this time under the pseudonym Council Flat with Charles Wyatt should see their way onto a full length tentatively earmarked for release on Music Fellowship whose catalogue looks well tasty - us having spied releases by the North Sea, the Golden Oaks and Robedoor. www.musicfellowship.com
.
MARK BARTON
|
