All India Radio and Josh Roydhouse – Piano and Ambience (Inevitable)

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There’s no hidden agenda to this release: a collection of, yep, piano and ambience recordings by Josh Roydhouse and All India Radio’s Martin Kennedy. Piano and Ambience is described as a ‘lost’s album, recorded between 2003-2006 and never released. The question of why it’s being released now is not successfully answered, least of all by the second-rate music contained on the disc.

Reference is made to Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s ambient collaborations, and from the opening piano runs they’re clearly an influence, but Roydhouse is too florid, the instrument too exposed. More troubling are the synths, which sweep in with all the subtlety of Jean-Michel Jarre, kitsch ethereal whorls best suited to the scented candle store. It makes you appreciate how much Eno achieved with so little. The tracks are all titled ‘Piano and Ambience 1’ through ‘9’, which speaks more of laziness than wilful abstraction, particularly when taken alongside the shoddy mastering of my promo copy, which clipped at the loud bits. We can expect more from these musicians than this.

Joshua Meggitt

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