Slomo – Zen And Zennor

Trilithon

Capturing the atmospheric flavour of an ancient Cornish burial site, Slomo’s fifth album is a mid-winter’s dream, ditching the well-trodden refuge of dark ambience in favour of something less menacing, more nuanced.

The wavering key-lines of the opener “Zen And Zennor”, its form-finding bounce echoing golden in the ear. A diffused textural float, inviting your imagination to wander its soothing architecture, its horizon stretched beams spindled in arced dynamics and flaring escarpments. Reading the inlays’ journey from village churchyard to burial site, the melody slowly wrapping itself around folklore’s porous pull.

A contemplative sway getting gorgeously over-saturated, nose-bagging the divine, before finally surfing a soft trumpeted reprieve. A beautifully restrained palette that just dissipates out of your grasp.

“Zennor Diode”’s circulative creep stains brilliantly, reconfigures the opener with a roughened rasp to texturally transform into a rich repetitive of sitar starlight and dribbling piano. A flexing meditative that majestically serpents the synapse, patterns your innerspace as it’s slowly battered in percussive recoils that grab at the impressionistic tails of that Zeit-like free-floating organ suddenly haunting its midline.

A spectral pleasure pieced then lichen- encrusted. A transformative treasure trove that rewards on every re-listen. The peeling dissolve of “Antechamber” that follows, all warm and arterial. An earthy caress rolling hazily over you in a sketch-like apparition endlessly mirroring itself, embering hidden depths and the distant howl of the ancestral dead.

Slomo’s Zen And Zennor contains stellar sonics that will be sound-tracking my next year’s visit for sure.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-