Review Summary: what kind of place is this?
Multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and singer/rapper extraordinaire Mr. Dean Blunt's latest release remains loyal to the esoteric and marginal aura the man's built for himself over the years. A V/A 'muggy' compilation with absolutely no info on who these 'various artists' may be, or if it even is a collective effort from different artists and not just the work of the same group of people.
The material here, luckily, makes all of this feel quite irrelevant.
It is characteristic of good music to create a distinct atmosphere, paint a certain 'soundscape' in our minds, but far more interesting to me is music that instead of creating, INHABITS a space, creating certain ‘scenes’.
I choose the word 'scene' because years of cinema (mainstream cinema, mostly) has taught us that the world doesn't end outside of the frame. The frame works more like our own window to a different world. In a similar way, the songs that form this compilation start and end but the place they inhabit remains. It precedes them.
Ever since the first second we get a sense of depth that runs through every track of this record. An instinctive idea of what's near and far, coordinates that give us a vague but constant feeling that we could potentially place all these sounds and instruments in respect to our own position in an imagined space.
This, however, isn't something interesting on its own. Most producers know this and use this idea of 'sound in place' to produce music and have been applying this for a long time now. What makes this illusion come fully realized on this album is the cinematographic intimacy of the places it decides to inhabit.
What most self-proclaimed ‘lo-fi’ and badly produced live recordings have in common is this sort of distance between the action and the listener. Everything sounds far away, or at least feels like it, filtered through crowd noise, static and/or other ‘obstacles’ that make the experience an alienating one.
However, here the results are the opposite: Everything here sounds relatively close to us and also close to each other. There’s a warmth only comparable to the kind that comes from a bunch of people together in a small room, there’s a dampness to it.
Music starts: gasping voices and careless playing that ooze with mood. Songs start and end abruptly, short pause between them. You feel like you can hear someone coughing in the recording area, or the bass player waiting for his part, or the vocalist looking for the lyrics of the next song. It’s all an illusion... but you are there! and you have the best seat in the house! the room becomes so nitid you can almost see it! an intimate rehearsal, a private show just for us. ‘This’ is somewhere, another place, and it exists ‘between’ song and song, and it makes the experience more powerful because of it.
When it comes to it, at least for me, music that can truly move me, that can not only paint a picture in my mind but place me in a different space, will always interest me more and have more power to make an impact in my life.
