Apologies are in order for the tardiness of this review only in that having a disc of such fragile beauty float by your ears is usually a signal for the reviewer to shout out to the hills of its presence. Such is the impulse that Bridge Carols elicits from this particular audience who has been listening golem-like to such ‘precious’ for way too long without fulfilling the duty entailed by its gift.
The album is all complex woven drone, found and manipulated sound, predominately of bells, piano and strings all melded in an electro acoustic presentation. There are moments when a glitch meets a sound of a thumbpiano or a musicbox and the ambiguity of the sound as it fleets by impresses you with its clever placement and use. There are far too many of these moments to document and the presentation in lush ambient sound sculpture delivers for the ear to such a degree that they dissolve quickly into the lush surrounds. The feature of Laura Gibson, whose voice is used as both an instrument and as a mode of delivering her snippets of verse: poetic , at times insightful and sometimes decorative. As an overall impression it delivers a mist like pastoral landscape of dream like proportions interweaving mythic imagery with a deft ambient sculptural approach.
Ethan Rose’s framing and manipulation of the Laura Gibson’s voice is masterful and the combination of a form of neo-Americana in electro acoustic surrounds is as fresh a combination as one could expect. Especially when the subject elicits so effortlessly an impressive timeless ephemera. This is in part because it is a collection of obscure and discrete instruments that are presented along with the familiar in subtle gestures that elicit maximal effect. The other part is in Gibson’s intonation that wafts between the fragile and the siren as it lulls and draws you into the music.
Closer descriptions of the music could be conveyed, analytical description of these songs would give the academic musical listener greater interest, of which the album provides in depth, but just as easily it can be received untrained as a beautiful dream of sound to clothe yourself; a shroud of light in which to slumber for some time.
Innerversitysound
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