His Name Is Alive – All The Mirrors In The House: Early Recordings 1979-1986

Disciples

The wind-caught piano on the first track on His Name Is Alive’s All The Mirrors In The House daggers a smooth spectral draw that dissipates into “Lliadin”’s sustained shimmer. Its autumnal flow pin-heads multi-tracked murmurs, eating into the unaccompanied fret repeats of “Something About Hope” that vortexes those Home Is In Your Head shivers that were to come. This is bloody lovely, that chromatic drizzle of analogue warmth to these softly distant hues, intimately incised, rainy weather music your mind floats out on like an oar-less boat.

By age ten, His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever was taping the sounds of nearby lakes, thunderstorms, anything that was interesting — even raiding his older brother’s LP collection to record them at half the speed. By his teens, a fascination for finding the limits of early samplers ensued, looping the next-door neighbours’ raking and shovelling, finding ingenuous ways to push everything to the harmonic beyond. Lucky for us, this has been obsessively documented, rescued from the perils of oxidation and now released back into the world as All The Mirrors In The House‘s fifteen tracks and a promise of more to come.

Each track bleeds into the other as if tonally torn from a blurry remembrance. These are half-lights you can almost taste, but never fully grasp. The merging melodies of “Rememory” or the Terry Riley-esque prism of “Equally Divided” are full of diffused definitions that slowly escape their containers like summer light cascading down the canopy to shoal in a hazy divergence of flickering forms. The fertile way the sounds mirage the space like a Chaim Soutine landscape, a ripple-torn reflection for the mind’s eye to chew over or re-configure.

“Fine as Feathers”‘ chorusing curls are superb as Livonia-like they wander wordless in that instrumental yarn, then dribble into “Reflection Pool”’s lattice-like dance and the Great Lakes of Michigan curving around “Echo Lake”’s haunted shoreline, full of waving apparition and watery metronome.

All The Mirrors In The House is a saturated space to truly lose yourself in.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-