Daniel O’Sullivan – Rosarium

House Of Mythology

Rosarium starts like you’re eavesdropping onto some fizzing broadcast, Daniel O’Sullivan‘s daughter Ivy imparting electrified words poetically bleeding into a cello’s resonate glide.

Cocooning ellipicals lightly dusted in harp-like radials and shimmering sententials, as if you were starring at the sun’s spiking corona. Affecting shapes akin to Shellyan Orphan caught on sweeping vocals, wordless and levitating a classical daybreak, to which the strings hold a golden glow filtering out on Astrud Steehouder’s chorusing femininity.

Weightless plumbs (far removed from the droning character of Daniel’s 2016 Laniakea involvement) that open out to the lilt-cusping delight of “Rose coloured in…”, a Penguin Cafe Orchestra gaiety dancing to a percussive lead, the bass clarinet buoyantly scooping at these lovely clustering notes breathing around your head.

Compostionally, Daniel and Peter Broderick shine, they conjure a light impressionistic fold to which the scent of chamomile readily clings. Each track is energised with a simple blush of colour, a tonally luminescent flourish of strings sometimes tied to melodic non-verbals that deftly detonate like a dandelion seed head caught on a summery breeze.

A discreet and delicate balance ethereally flown – the piano curls of “For Ari”, their graceful economy like cascading calico draped in darts of water-coloured harmony. Loving the lowercase zither of this album, mines a sense of Englishness – rurally rich atmospherics that feel like a homage of sorts to Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure album in which environmental sounds seep into and leak out of to great affect.

“The Violet Panoply”’s’ rivering sustain unfurling to a lyrical/less songform shivering out a curious space-age. Unlocking shackles and effect-ridden fissures distance-dining on a shut door’s clicking finality. The feathered uplift of “Waterbearer”, its bubbling brook thrown to the brambling shade of a child’s Shakespearean words and sea-gull caw.

The details are subtle, enriching, a softly sutured waltz that’s warmly bewitching bursting into the poppy embrace of “Argentile” as the instrumentation is pirouette-painted in oscillating vocals. A pearling patina that feels very contemporary, flows through the remaining tracks, to skull-clasp the sorrowful beauty of “Celestograph” in a slow starry crescent of the night sky that seems to vaporise on echoing Latin.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-