Full title:
WITH OUR ARMS OPEN WIDE WE MARCH TOWARDS THE BURNING SEA
GLISSANDO are a duo (Elly May Irving and Richard Knox) in the company, for this recording, of six others: Sophie Barnes, trumpet; Angharad Cooper, violin; Thom Corah, trombone; Dave Martin and Tom Morris, voices; and Shorn Keld, electronic manipulation. All are names from the thoughtful end of the ever-widening Leeds musical spectrum: The Rosie Taylor Project; Held By Hands; Her Name is Calla; iLiKETRAiNS and Immune.
"WITH OUR ARMS OPEN WIDE WE MARCH TOWARDS THE BURNING SEA" comprises nine rather dark and mournful songs against a slowly moving, northern ocean of orchestral textures and harmonies. There are minimalist and ambient devices at work. Elly May Irving's flickering voice is the emotional centre. Even when she is not singing, her ghostly, unsettling presence seems to define the mood. Her piano accompaniments are minimalist and secure. There's beauty in the voice, but something fragile and wayward floats in and out making it more compelling than mere purity. Richard Knox's arrangements, guitar and "droney/soundscape stuff" (as Knox has self effacingly described it) provide the earthly sonic context. The partnership flourishes as a single musical voice and the friends and associates lend voices enough to express the creative imagination of Glissando without taking over. On "Grekken", the eighth track, for example, Elly's exposed voice wavers, against shifting piano chords, with a second higher vocal line in the distance. This is core Glissando stuff. But half way in a richer male voice sidles up quietly after nice touches of bell-like guitar notes and shifts the tone and the mood to somewhere quite different. It was only after three or four hearings that I really noticed how familiar that lugubrious voice was, so gently was it dropped into the flow. Dave Martin of iLiKETRAiNS, of course.
"Grekken" is one of the five shorter songs on the album. The remaining four tracks run between ten and fifteen minutes each. so the full CD is an expansive hour and a good bit. It's a stretch of time that deserves full attention, but I doubt that many with a romantic and wistfully melancholic disposition would want to stint themselves. Dusk, gathering dark, a rattle of starlings and a creaking hinge on a door, bumping restlessly against its frame in the sudden cool breeze would be the moment to start.
Lyrics show up in the second track "With a Kiss And a Tear". A long drawn breath of apprehension contemplates death and sadness through all the elements and in fear of the timeless pain of unbidden love. They seemsto flow right on into "Flood" (track 3).
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Water, fire, earth and air recur throughout the album. The shiver of loneliness, so close to oblivion in the passion for another is old, true and made chilling all over again. Ultimately, pain, blindness and death are offered. And, as so often before, they seem unreasonably comforting. When words are not offered (as in the fifteen minutes of "Like Everything You See") the echoes of the words we have left behind shape the thoughts that emerge in the slow evolution of harmonic forms reminiscent (for me, at least) of PHIL NIBLOCK's drone music or, perhaps, of the emotional stillness of JOHN TAVERNER. It's vernacular music, moving outwards to touch the regions where quite different kinds of (academic) artists have also found meaning.
In that respect it seems to me a very brave album. In laying bare some very difficult emotional and spiritual territory, and doing so at the edge of what self-made musicians might feel capable of achieving, it takes considerable risks. In some places or for some listeners it won't work. If you are already familiar with Taverner, Pärt, or the great Requiem masses from Bach to Fauré, you might want to stay where you are. If you are back in the post-rock field with God Speed! or Explosions In The Sky, you might want to rock and roll a little more. If you were me you might have gone for broke and demanded the piano parts be re-recorded on a decent concert piano in a big room.
But this is, after all, a considerable achievement by a small label with no more resources than friendship, love, talented friends and not a lot more.
There are some haunting tunes too. As I type this sentence the descending piano notes of "Always the Storm" are turning upwards towards an approaching violin. It is very affecting and as Elly's voice sings wordlessly upwards, a little distant sunshine seems to flicker across the clouds.
www.slowsecret.com
www.myspace,com/glissando
www.last.fm/music/Glissando
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