Seth Cooke – Pneuma

LF

This was conceived after a particularly arduous eighteen months whilst a basement flat beneath Seth Cooke‘s Leeds home was being renovated. Building noise, pneumatic drills, shouting, workmen urinating in the garden… you name it, and it was probably suffered. The sheer beauty etched into the metallics of this disc seem testament to how scarring this experience must have been. In fact Seth describes this work as alchemy, an attempt to banish the misery and recoup the treasure. He’s not far from the mark, the slow tendrils of drone on the first 25 minutess certainly feel like effective exorcism, as he transforms the gritty bite of a jackhammer into an aerosol of golden eternities.

A Cthulhu of cylindrical dynamites cutting through your consciousness like slowly unwrapped sweets. The aggressive thud of metal on concrete, a muted chatter, pneumatic hammers converted into a rebounded percussion of vaporous memory, diffused points of reverberation like one of those cut-out mechanical diagrams but in sound – a slow motion dissection of eerie beauty… pulsating… glittering in diamond confettis and pitch-shifted phantoms, swelling twists of focus. Without a doubt, one of my favourite drone tracks of 2013.

The second track is more direct, field-recorded drills segmented into different aural explorations. A canvas of sound pulled around in a multitude of differing timbres as commonplace is re-examined, uncovering exquisite details that you never thought could ever exist in something that normally promotes the covering of ears in anxious discomfort. Each segment breaking things down further, revelling in regal-like shards, revealing a porous magic that’s really visual, like some CGI retinal fest circling inside your head buttered further by the psycho-actives of the cover and its biosphere of diffused colour and jewel-like cantilevers.

An album that is a thought, caught and explored with bounding optimism.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-