The latest beautiful offering from Courier with its own hand-cut sleeve is a collaboration between old pals Nick Dawson and Stuart Bowditch, who were responsible for the genesis of the Silhouette Cameo 3 compilation that was released last year.
In keeping with that album’s vibe of familiar sounds taken out of context and sent flailing into orbit, this latest improv collaboration has been stewing (no pun intended) since August 2017, and is as alien and vacuum-surrounded as it is possible for sound collage to be. The list of ingredients that make up the soundscapes on A Thin Veneer have an unlikely look which sounds partly real and partly invented, and that is a good explanation of the album.
There is something mildly drifting and anodyne about some of the backdrop washes, but the mystery shades and sharp gestures that flicker and scutter across them like oblique clouds across a waning moon are seriously at odds. All appears electronic, and whether it is soft-edged and gently insistent or ragged and destructive, at the start it feels removed from humanity. There is a scarcity of oxygen here, and things move at their own pace without the assistance of gravity. A kind of beat appears in opener “Soon We’ll Be Outmoded”, but it still feels alien albeit rhythmic, amplified by the soft screech of corners turned and machines manipulated.
There is an offbeat feel to some tracks like “Unthethered”, but its manic abstraction makes everything else feel harsh and random. In the background though is something soft and familiar enough to prevent its straying too far. The jagged electronic twists are at turns irreverent and awkward, and some of it does feel reminiscent of the Cameo project, but taken out of context they are rendered strange and off. The one thing that draws it closer to home is the similarity I could hear to some of David Sylvian‘s more esoteric experiments in the 1980s; the drifting sounds from his work with Holger Czukay or the instrumental journeys on Gone To Earth but relocated to a colder, more barren place. I am not saying they are similar, but it is the same as when you think you recognise something fleetingly from a train window as you speed past, like an echo of memory. Trying to place the sounds with the list of ingredients is difficult, as the soundscapes are as esoteric as the list. There is a particular set of rising and falling tones that push us into the stratosphere; the throb of space junk or the slow monotony of a spacelab crane. Somehow, they have replicated a vacuum here around the sounds, a sense of darkness making its way from points unknown, and being intercepted somewhere out of sight and translated into the messages found here in a juxtaposition between the known and the unknown. Bells peal and the sound of a ruler on a desk describe familiar imagery, but they are kidnapped by jagged scars of electronic noise building to a technologically disastrous crescendo.“Lag” is the closest they come to a rhythmic lullaby, with a few distant scorches — but as the album draws to a conclusion, so we begin to feel that there is a settling down of tension. A marble run is employed beautifully on “The Disappearance Of The Things We Loved”, which is almost meditative, but then we are thrust once more into the gaping chasm as the harsh, metallic tones and giddyingly offset beats of “Salve” lead into the coruscating vista of sound that is the final track “A Thin Veneer Of Civilised Modernity”. It is part of this earth and part not, and it is this dichotomy that runs through the entire album, and makes for a rewarding and disorientating listen.
-Mr Olivetti-
