The dusty kinetics of Hotel Bravo‘s opener “Hotel Paris” slope into your ear in skipping recoils, navigated by quiet words and whispered replies, periodically broken by a taut Japanese-flavoured melodic and pattering synth-washes.
An ambient lamp light falls into the fragmented flux of “When The Chimes End” its stuttering percussives taking the dusty grooves of the first track to milk a purposeful sparseness that bleeds throughout this release from Rapoon, something that romances the crumbling grey and beige of the derelict hotel furnishing the cover.
Robin Storey seems to be attempting to capture the subtle fade of memory, maybe, something the ballerina-like contours of “On Our Path” try to cling to. That indistinct slip, the softening definitions falling from one’s grasp, as if that frozen summer house in Doctor Zhivago was melting away behind layers of tracing paper. The radial fractures of sitar and tabular of the third track making for perfect rainy weather listening as you are pulled across its achingly beautiful keylines that linger, shimmer-shot by a koto gold-rush that chills like remembrance. An ethnically tinged tilt that’s abandoned for piano keys that shoal then disperse in reverbed tapers, echoic patterns swimming upstream of a damaged ambience, pointed reminders of Harold Budd pearl-circling the dust in repeated refrains.This is something that the expanding vistas of “In Lights Of Gold” seem a little overrun by, a trickle of golden pins glinting too loudly over the swirling hues below. A slight irksome point the debris-filled hiss of the album’s ending attentively adjusts into lonely latitudes of chord lost in oozy exhales of static and subtle whisper.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-