Straight out of Bristol’s thriving underground comes this forty-minute slice of unnerving ambience from EMEI, AKA Louise Brady. Vexing her inner witch, this fine example of tonal paganism more than matches the haunting abstractions that package it all up.
The distorted timbres that greet you on “Frosted Glass” are a lo-fi pleasure, disquietly rattle round in your head, possess your speakers in smouldering hues. Rough-weathered vibes blissfully overdriven, laddered in osculating holes and troughed frequencies, the keystrokes murmuring like a discarded tape ribboning a roadside hedge (I’m showing my age here). So much drone music has been polished to oblivion you can hardly taste the zest anymore , it’s so great to hear a bit more pith, it really is.
Each track attentively layers the action up, dynamically builds the tension, occasionally throwing out blemishes of vocal that desiccate brilliantly. The rural rawness and shadowy expectation of “In The Dark Of The Night” that vividly inhabits. The apparition-filled ecstasy of “Blackbird” (a track that’s well worth the purchase price alone) with its pulsing undercurrent and hovering circulars, that itchy wooliness of synth-work caught in epic traceries and secateurring sonics. This album’s a well-observed beast full of smooth debris and disembodied shade, a fleeting flavour of moth wings puckering the dusty air as it milks a sense of ruined grandeur, slips its shackles to whispering keystrokes and a serration of sampledelica. A little bit of jaggy rave scooping an altogether different scene before the final track (signified by four dots ) limbers to a harsh conclusion. Really hoping to catch this in the flesh very soon, but meanwhile this document is succouring my ears in sweet seduction.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
