Ishmael Cormack – Ammil

KrysaliSound

Ishmael Cormack entered the thirteenth century church of St Andrews near his rural Somerset home with a view to laying down a series of improvised sketches using tape loops and found sounds, trying to release natural but subtle polyrhythms from these unlikely sources. The overall effect, spread across the six tracks contained herein, is one of a series of faint, impressionist watercolours, rendered so subtly that at first they might drift by, but the ear is caught and slowly you are drawn into this hesitantly unfolding world.

The sounds shimmer and flicker, highlighted by the odd touch of piano or brushed guitar, but it all feels temporary, fleeting, as if scattered like ripples across a pond, hard to focus on; yet the overall effect is unmissable. It is a mosaic of sound in which it is possible to catch glimpses of stasis, but those distant images are hard to pin down and are lost amongst the constantly evolving canvas.

You can almost taste the loops at times, the tang of dust in the air, swirling in the slow unravelling of the sounds, with the sense of silence in the old building surrounding the production and becoming part of the layers of the pieces on Ammil. The feeling of the natural being drawn into the space is palpable, and the subtlety and sparseness allow the listener to insert their own images.

The sense of aural watercolours is there at every point; the dabs of guitar like stalks of flowers up close to the viewer as the rush of the found sounds moving behind equate to a distant stream, your eye drawn beyond the foreground to the light glitter beyond. Each of the six pieces here differ in these fine details, as if they were a similar image, but taken from a different perspective, time of day or event of the season. I am hoping they are real tape loops; there is something of the romantic in me sensing the joins as they pass over the heads, and the image of Ishmael bent over his splicing set, searching for the perfect length. It is a romantic notion for a romantic vision.

The idea of rhythm is most obvious on “Sister On The Shoreline”; the looped guitar intensely, slow with creaks from the body and the scrape of the strings merging with what sounds like the settling of the old building in the warm glow of the sun. As the piece continues, so you find yourself looking out for tiny details of sound, seeing if they return; but as you do so, the realisation dawns that the guitar has dropped out completely, dispelled like a wreath of smoke around your head.

Its gradual return at some point later is impossible to pinpoint time-wise, and the whole album behaves like this, slowing things down and taking you entirely out of the usual flow of things; a very welcome tonic to the trials of everyday life. Once again, Krysalisound have put their finger on the slowed down pulse and found a corner of quiet reverie.

-Mr Olivetti-