Olan Mill (Alex Smalley and Svitlana Samoylenko) explore a remarkably similar soundworld to Deaf Centre: slow string passages expanded into dense weeping walls of sound through heavy processing. Since Deaf Centre stripped back their sound somewhat with Owl Splinters they’re even closer, but that’s not to denigrate either group – it’s a beautiful world they create and there’s ample room for both of them.
While their debut Pine was a fine work Paths is stronger: less reliant on maudlin sentiment, more golden, yearning and hopeful, like the change from Gas’s Zauberberg to Konigsforst. Most pieces begin with slow string bows before these ebb, flow, multiply, and collapse in screaming ecstasy; vast sheets of honeyed synthetic wash. The boundary separating individual components, and individual performers, dissolves, as each element merges with its neighbour, single cello lines splitting into multi-tracked doubles, overlapped triples, before uniting as one dense sound.
Like Arvo Part, there’s strong emotional resonance to these works, a kind of painful nostalgia mourning good times lost, but also celebratory of what can be, or has been, accomplished. In ‘Bleu Polar’ the strings build and build and shimmer, further enhanced by sustained choral tones, like a more bombastic Stars of the Lid. ‘Springs’ develops tinny piano doodles into something equally vast, with menacing bass drones ploughing the depths, strings tickling the heavens. The final ‘On Leaving’ recalls the final moments of some Chinese cinematic epic, a great mountain of sound sighing in resolution. Paths lasts only around 30 minutes, which is welcome as the relentless grandiosity can be exhausting.
Joshua Megitt
