It’s a wordy title for a dense album. An album chock-full of ideas, textures, attitudes, approaches, vocalists, found-sounds, heart-on-sleeve indie arrangements, bottled blowflies, swelling accordions and enigmatic lyrical content. James Brewster previously recorded under the Mole Harness moniker, and has since relocated to Sweden from his native Bristol, and has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, adding a vocal element to his previously instrumental music. As A Hovering Insect Mass Breaks Your Fall is best listened to in a single sitting, allowing the album to unfold as intended. In these days of musical overabundance and the shuffle function on iEverything, it’s gratifying listening experience to let an album unfold over its preordained duration.
My one criticism of As A Hovering Insect Mass Breaks Your Fall is its Bowerbird like nature. Bowerbirds live in the antipodean undergrowth, foraging mercilessly for blue objects in order to spruce up their nest area for prospective mates. I’m sure that James Brewster hasn’t been scratching around for blue pegs or oyster shells, but certain passages of As A Hovering Insect Mass Breaks Your Fall suffer from too many ideas, segues, sections and textures being included within the one piece. I suppose that I have some advanced form of musical ADD, so for my listening tastes, generally this “eclectic” approach isn’t a problem. The question I returned to on numerous occasions was “What is the purpose of this juxtaposition, does it work within the context of the music?”
“Wingbeat Fission” has this quality. Nick Talbot of Gravenhurst provides whispery sad-boy vocals, as propulsive indie-electronica is spread out in new directions via dirty electro/EBM actions. Backwards vocals, buzzing flies, and a spoken word passage by an Iranian puppet-maker in Farsi (or maybe Swedish) round out this piece, which is the source for the album title. The album starts out on a more minimal, even operatic footing – powerful liturgical vocals from Men Diamler speak to me, but of what? The same vocal conceit returns numerous times throughout “Vraikan Sundan” with the intertwining male and female vocal refrains reminiscent of Steve Reich’s Tehillim. During this track the multiple personalities of James Brewster’s music making become apparent, you could be forgiven for thinking this shift heralded the beginning of a new tune. On “Landfall” James steps out from behind his equipment to provide a curious pontification on bird-skin waistcoats and other such arcane ephemera.
Human beings are complex and contrary creatures with a multitude of conflicting interests that can often be self-edited out of any public airing or creative endeavours. James Brewster’s As A Hovering Insect Mass Breaks Your Fall revels in this facet of human nature to produce a unique album that pays little heed to restrictions of genre or language.
Oliver Laing
