RL/VL (Real Life/Virtual Life) is 18 year old, Belfast-based Jack Hamill. His debut album on Hidden Shoal is brilliant. There are obvious stylistic influences – late 70s Eno at the pinnacle of those – but Chagrin has enough to stand on its own as one of the best examples of ambience that I have heard for a long time.
The first thing that stands out is the amount of recording residue that is ingrained in the music. Alongside the minimal ‘musical’ drones, what sounds like the hum of old 4-track cassette recorder mechanisms, as well as the associated tape hiss, are allowed to feature as lead instruments. As are sounds such as gently banged micrphones, making the kind of popping that very audio engineer attempts to eliminate or, likewise, wind distortion in a cheap field microphone. Hamill, instead, lets them, at first, stand out incongruously, then repeats them over and over until they become part of the fabric of the music. It is also often difficult to determine what instruments are creating the more traditional sounds. At first I assumed that most of it was synth driven, but further listening has got me thinking that there is much more guitar in there than i at first suspected. I could be wrong though, the whole point of this music is the quiet meshing of vague, indiscreet sounds. Another feature are those ‘musical’ sounds. They are some of the most acrid and corroded I have ever heard, without Hamill ever resorting to distortion or bitcrushing. There is the odd fallback to New Age chordal wallpaper as the album progresses, but these are thankfully brief and don’t undermine the album as a whole.
The best description I can think of for this music is that it sounds like the aural equivalent of a long disused wall. Its layers of paint and decades of history are now exposed by weather, its usefulness has long since departed, yet it stands as an almost silent testament to vast amounts of information that require forensic observation to uncover. Chagrin is a peaceful, still, beautiful testament to post-industrial decay.
Adrian Elmer
*
