Everything on ‘Days’ by Billy Gomberg seems wispy and vague, as though the lightest breath might reduce it to ashes. It’s a bit like the musical equivalent of Cybille Shepherd on Moonlighting, beautiful but distant and softened by silk stockings. Piano and voice – Gomberg’s own as well as Anne Guthrie singing in Swedish – are heavily treated, smeared into transparent watercolours, while traces of field recording, tinkerings and rustlings, wash up alongside. There’s something of Akira Rabelais in the manner in which tones and traces twist and dissolve like the wind during ‘Darkened’, and there’s much to admire in the ethereal lightness of these pieces, their near erasure, but that also makes them frustratingly elusive. Headphones are essential; through speakers these featherweight sketches amount to nothingness.
Joshua Meggitt
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