Some frankly purple prose about a bunch of fuzzy noises, but I do think that Lee is excellent. Even people who would never listen to drones and noise tend to find that they like his stuff, especially live.
LEE RILEY – FROM HERE WE ARE NOWHERE (Eyeless)
It’s common to talk about textures and colours in music, but this new EP from Oxford’s leading experimental musician is more likely to make you think of space and volume: chasms of unfathomable depth, or vast corridors without end. The title track, a complex and fuzzily capacious drone, sounds like Zeno playing a cello with an infinitely long bow that will never finish its stroke, and the following track, ‘Lifting Undertow’, pits rumbling bass against what we can only describe as a hollow hiss, and feels like swimming slowly across the ocean’s murky floor on a manta ray the size of a city. Like many of the six tracks, in place of thematic development in the standard musical sense, this piece progresses towards a change in focus, with an intense sombre rattling stealing the attention (imagine the sound of a corpulent spectre dragging its chains through a paddling pool full of gravel).
But not everything here is ominous or oppressive, and ‘Undoing These Knotted Times’ creates a warm cocooning atmosphere by adding airy sonic wisps to a deeply resonant hum, and is probably what you’d hear if Brian Eno and David Lynch tried to teach an industrial ventilation system the ocarina. By the time you get to the gritty scouring noise of final track ‘No One Knows What’s Inside’, which feels as though you’re trying to clean a desert with your ears, you’ll be surprised that half an hour has gone by. Although there’s often no sense of traditional pitch to this music, let alone melody, it feels structured, varied and immensely satisfying. This release is arguably Lee’s finest work to date and we advise you to get on board...or at least tumble in and get lost.
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