It is always a pleasure to learn of new Rothko material and this return is even more welcome considering it has been over two years since the Refuge For Abandoned Souls album.
This first post-lockdown release thankfully contains none of the confusion and despair that has dogged some performers in this liminal period and it feels, as ever, as if Mark Beazley is operating outside the usual sphere of reference and preparing these missives as grounding messages on our behalf. Listening to them takes us beyond the day-to-day and drops us into an intense slow-moving landscape of shadow and texture that ebbs and flows with the passing of aeons.
A four-track album of thirty minutes in length, Make Space Speak takes up plenty of space but unfolds slowly, the simmering distortion of the self-titled opener spreading towards you like a vaporous cloud, but there are almost pastoral drifting textures partly hidden that highlight that slow dream of static and silence. It picks its way through a half-remembered sketch of home, lapping like molten waves against a dusky abandoned shoreline, the intensity coming and going like a summer storm moving inexorably closer.The sounds really are extraordinary in places; the harsh, textured bass of “Ever Dissolving Edges” comes as if from the inside of a high-flying aeroplane, the drone a constant as bass chords unfurl like rolls of razor wire. They glint an glimmer in that mysterious continuous light that sits above the clouds.
It stutters and starts as the rougher, more threatening sounds glower in the background, lending a sense of menace that is removed by the bowed depth and resonance of ‘”The Absence Of Absence”. Here, sparks of electronic light fleetingly pass the lugubrious bass figures; but when the distortion erupts, as it seems wont to do, it floods into every conceivable gap, each molecule of space taken up by the inescapable growl. The recording ends with “Water Always Finds A Way”, and here the notes are so stiff and textural that when they finally end, the decay drifts into the furthest distance, taking all else with it as the sound overpowers the subtle piano steps that echo in the limitless space that surrounds those decaying notes.That space is aching to be explored and when it is filled with the cleaner, purer tones, it is as if they have arrived from nowhere and then vanish again just as you are beginning too focus on their presence. The use of piano here is a fresh addition to Mark’s soundworld and finds him once again moving subtly onward in his exploration of the bass guitar.
Find him over at Bandcamp and allow his unique presence in the musical firmament to infect your reality once again.
-Mr Olivetti-
