Caught In The Wake Forever & glacis

Caught In The Wake Forever & glacis - Version & Delineation
Crow Versus Crow. CVC009
Cassette/DL
100 copies.

I’ve been listening to a lot of piano music of late: Debussy, Satie, Philip Glass. I find the empty spaces and the weightlessness of their more melancholic work the perfect riposte to a crazy world. Me and Mrs Fisher were lucky enough to see Philip Glass perform his solo piano ‘Mad Rush’ in Verona this year - an evening concert in an outdoor amphitheater, the threat of rain subsiding, the warm air perfectly still and the audience spellbound. Even now, months after the event, the sheer weight of emotion that Glass managed to put into his performance hasn’t lost any of its force. It’s been played here endlessly ever since with barely any loss of its magnificence.

Version & Delineation works in almost the same way [though I’m in no way putting the creators of this work on the same platform as those aforementioned greats] except that these six tracks have been improvised and have had crud smeared all over them. In the nicest possible way of course, noise crud with a small ‘n’ like it says on the press release. Here you can hear children shouting, birds squawking, creaking floorboards, digital grit, strange whirrings as if from active lab equipment, brooms sweeping floors like a jazz drummers snare brush. The piano sounds like it was recorded from down the hall, all distant, sad and forlorn. I listened many, many times and found myself drifting in to that same Satie/Debussy/Glass like world.

A release made by two people; the magnificent sounding Euan Alexander Millar-McKeeken who uses iPhone voice memo software to record the spontaneous piano compositions and Fraser McGowan with an Akai sampler and software to capture those ‘snapshots of domestic minutiae’. Six ridiculously short tracks that are all wrapped up within the space of fifteen minutes.

The cassette itself is all a-glitter like an asteroid belt on a clear night up a mountain, the sleeve that surrounds the cassette is made of recycled card and the insert of tracing paper. I found all of it a salve capable of easing my weary bones, a balm for my battered brain.  




    
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