Title: Departing Like Rivers
Artist: Shackleton
Label: Woe To The Septic Heart
Cat Number: SEPTICLP03
Genre: Defies Categorisation
A: Something Tells Me/Pour Out Like Water
B1: The Turbulent Sea
B2: Shimmer, Then Fade
C1: One Of Us Escaped
C2: The Light That Was Hidden
D1: Few Are Chosen
D2: Transformed Into Love
One of the most singular artists working in music, never mind of the electronic variety; Shackleton’s productions sound like nothing on Earth and always way ahead of their time. This is his third album on his Woe To The Septic Heart label, and it’s every bit as immersive and impossible to pigeonhole as expected. Not that I would be so stupid as to try. Listening to it is a pan cultural experience. Walt Whitman wasn’t wrong when he said “(It) contains multitudes.” This is particularly true of the longer tracks: ‘Something Tells Me/Pour Out Like Water’, ‘The Turbulent Sea’ and ‘Transformed Into Love’, but only because you can squeeze that little bit more in. The influence of post punk sampling techniques and Cabaret Voltaire/Richard H. Kirk is very strong, and I’m also reminded of the gamelan escapades of 23 Skidoo. Vocals and spoken word are used as instruments to plug gaps in the musical narrative and as sonic layers in their own rite. The whole collection has a hallucinatory quality that never wavers and gives the listener the impression that they could be anywhere in the world at any time as long as that location is heavily imbued with mysticism and spiritual disorientation. I have rarely listened to an album that weaves so many disparate strands together in order to create a piece of work that is so cross-culturally pervasive. One minute you feel you’re listening to the soundtrack of the souk, the next your cloaked in Britsh folk It’s an amazing listen and one that I advise doing so while in the company of mind bending narcotics, or maybe not . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment