Seaming To – Dust Gatherers

O SingAtMe

Seaming To likes to collaborate and lend her unique and otherworldly voice to various projects, including Graham Massey‘s Toolshed and Paddy Steer‘s Homelife from back in the 2000s.

Coming up to recent times, Dust Gatherers is her second solo album and follows on ten years from the first. Clearly, this has been a question of waiting for stars to align and the gathering of sympathetic friends to help bring her visions to effect, and an intriguing sound it really is.

You feel a window opening onto a new world, one half seen but richly embroidered with the hint of instruments; a gleam of gold, the shimmer of bells, the ethereal quaver of the glockenspiel, all woven around that voice, a clear siren enhanced by a ghostly choir.

Wordless ululations are as potent as they drift weightless, borne by the gentlest trade winds, moving at their own pace and drawing you in. Hypnotic and very simple keyboard riffs bring to mind Pram in places, mainly in the way those unexpected worlds are constructed, jagged piece by soothing strain with the odd reminder of ’50s exotica tingling the edges of your ears. Keyboard oddities creep, the feeling of a spider in its web, the ghost of Fenella Fielding caught dallying in an illicit garden.

The tracks glide effortlessly through the ages, often settling for exotica experimentation, that anything goes mentality, clarinet spookiness rubbing shoulders with digitally disturbed glock or something of that sort. It could be anything, but its familiarity is twisted, tainted somehow, warped through a unique vision.

At other points, strings are introduced and somehow bring an air of normalcy to the proceedings; but that only goes further to highlight the voice and its romantic, autumnal nature. When the digital dust is scattered, structure is lost, that lovely vibrato rising through the sci-fi tremors, effortlessly slipping out like wreaths of smoke swerving the staccato tones that jostle and jive.

More often that not, the voice creates its own path and the musical accompaniment is incapable of doing anything but following, dropping reminders, hesitant guides to possible direction but never daring to assume. The album ends with a stunned, slow folky edge, a lullaby lament that is just the perfect sayonara, drawing a gauzey curtain across this magical scenery.

Ten years is a long time to wait; but why not when the end result is this engrossing? Do we have to wait another decade?

-Mr Olivetti-