Matt Elliott - Folk mutations of a sound manipulator

Ebbs and flows, stylistic transformations, destructurings and sonic reworkings have constantly characterized musical artistic expression in the turbulent passage between the two centuries, in its drive toward the future and its conscious reclaiming of the past. Certainly representative of such transitions is the figure of Matt Elliott, an artist born musically in the restless Bristol of the mid-90s and who recently relocated to France, where, in a peaceful and voluntary isolation, he left behind industrial and electronic experimentation only loosely ascribable to post-rock, to transform himself into a cultured and committed modern composer, fascinated by French singer-songwriter tradition, classical music and Mitteleuropean folk. The works released under his own name over the last three years are the fruit of his time in France, but his story in fact goes back much further, precisely to his Bristol-era experiences alongside bands such as Amp, Crescent, Movietone and Flying Saucer Attack, and to that, already highly personal, of Third Eye Foundation.

Between 1995 and 2001, Third Eye Foundation released six albums, including the collaborations of In Version and the remixes of I Poo Poo On Your Juju: Third Eye Foundation's artistic output is varied and ever-shifting, starting with the alienating post-industrial noise of the debut Semtex, six long and harsh tracks full of distortion, clanging and sinister palpitations, barely softened by Debbie Parsons's ethereal voice (later the protagonist of the Foehn project) on "Dreams On His Fingers" and by the gloomy ambient expanses of "Next Of Kin" and "Rain". Onto the rough electric darkness of the debut, and that, even more devastated and unsettling, of the remix album In Version, Elliott soon grafts austere electronic beats, giving rise, on the following Ghost and the EP Sound Of Violence (both released in 1997), to a kind of oblique industrial jungle-dub, made of disharmonic, noisy and furiously deconstructed sounds, interspersed, however, with more expansive episodes of sinister ambient psychedelia, such as "The Star's Gone Out" and "The Out Sound From Way Out", in which noise turns into impalpable drones shaping spectral compositions, comparable to those of Aphex Twin and partly also to some of the contemporaneous productions of Piano Magic, albeit decidedly lighter and more graceful.

In Elliott's music of this period one finds a clearly destructive intent, and, still barely held in check, that deep unease towards the outside world which will later, in a profoundly different key, characterize his more recent work. Dark tracks and unsettling atmospheres also mark the following You Guys Kill Me, in which, however, the fury of the previous records begins to settle, tempered by a compositional approach entirely focused on sound manipulation and on the interweaving of synthetic and real elements, perfectly represented by the over eight minutes of "An Even Harder Shade Of Dark", a track that ends with jazzy percussion and a barely hinted piano sound. For now these are still just experiments, fragments scattered among many others in a primordial broth that is still essentially noisy and confused, cut through by a prevailing jungle pulse.

On the following Little Lost Soul, the rough edges of Third Eye Foundation's music are further smoothed out, and a greater refinement begins to emerge in the sonic settings, though still traceable to a deconstructed style in which the use of electronics gradually becomes functional to a deliberate expansiveness with almost ambient traits. The compositions retain, and indeed accentuate, their spectral character, but increasingly grafted onto them, especially in the album's last three tracks, is that melancholic vein which will later characterize Elliott's "solo" output. Added to this, in the first part of the long track "Lost", is the emergence of a taste for the elegant intersection of loops, acoustic sounds and melody, also found on the remix album I Poo Poo On Your Juju (which includes reworkings of tracks by, among others, Blonde Redhead, Yann Tiersen, Tarwater, Remote Viewer), on which, moreover, the vocal element, already present mostly in sampled form on the previous album, emerges in a more fully realized way, becoming an integral part of an electronic approach "with a human face", stemming on one hand from its author's dark wave background, and on the other from a growing interest in the harmonic and organic development of what had until then been merely deconstructed.

But, however much, with hindsight, one can here and there spot the early signs of his artistic transformation in some of the previous records, the real turning point in Matt Elliott's artistic path coincides with his move to France and the corresponding abandonment of the Third Eye Foundation moniker (which would nonetheless make one more fleeting appearance in 2004, on the further, interesting remix album OuMuPo #1).

Almost simultaneously with the ten-inch Borderline Schizophrenic (three tracks to be listened to alternately at 33 or 45 rpm), still marked by electronic and experimental traits, Elliott released in 2003 his first album under his own name: The Mess We Made, a work devoted to the confusion of the human soul's feelings, which also marks the first expression of his deep personal and political reflection on contemporary life.

Despite the continued presence of electronic elements — though far more discreet and understated than in the past — the album has an almost "classical" approach, not so far removed from the compositions of French artists such as Yann Tiersen and Sylvain Chauveau, and is centered mainly on rural-orchestral instrumentation, dominated by slender piano melodies, variously supported by strings, accordions and acoustic touches. Added to this, in an indolent and often barely sketched song form, are Elliott's subdued vocal deliveries, or the evocative, hallucinated ones of elusive choral voices, found for instance on the opening "Let Us Break" and on "The Sinking Ship Song".

The musical structures are pared down to the bone, fragile piano-led harmonies onto which Elliott's near-natural tendency towards sound manipulation grafts acoustic passages with drowsy folk tints (particularly on the closing "Forty Days") and, above all, copious electronic loops, which smudge and lend a chilling, sinister aura to almost every track. The use of electronics is mostly discreet, framing and adding a shiver-inducing murkiness even to a composition of limpid classicism like "Cotard's Syndrome", in which the cadenced, romantic sound of the piano sits alongside a few acoustic chords that seem almost to play at interweaving with subtle reverse loops. In "Also Ran" and "The Mess We Made", on the other hand, the electronic pulse, however muffled, turns feverish, tearing through ethereal, elusive melodies with its syncopated, almost danceable intrusion. Moreover, on a record built on contrasts, one particularly jarring tension is that between the modernity embodied by the beats and electronic treatments and the timeless spirit of a refined, intense folk, which expresses itself with a richness of sound in the two true ballads "The Dog Beneath The Sun" and "Forty Days".

The overall effect of the record is disorienting, successfully combining past and present, classicism and modernity, giving rise to a moving portrait of subtle despair. The artistic design underlying it is well defined and undoubtedly ambitious, even if it inevitably bears, at least in part, the mark of Matt Elliott's harsher and more difficult background — though he would soon show that a complex, effective album like The Mess We Made was not, for him, a destination, but only the first step towards a further evolution.

On the following Drinking Songs, the atmospheres grow even more rarefied, dark and intimate, with the almost total abandonment of electronics and the opening up of "classical" compositions to a plurality of influences, first and foremost those of folk and traditional European music.

Besides a very long revisiting of the previous album (the closing "The Maid We Mess", over 20 minutes of variously deconstructed miscellany of previously released tracks), Drinking Songs presents seven compositions of dark, decadent tones, evocative of a spleen that not even the alcoholic oblivion invoked by the title manages to soothe. Here Elliott continues to communicate in music his dramatic, fatalistic vision of the contemporary world, of which he can do nothing but helplessly note the irremediable, tragic fate, marked by the madness of war and the arms race in general. Many of the tracks are explicitly inspired by this pessimistic weltanschauung: "The Kursk" recalls the tragedy of the Russian nuclear submarine, opening with over a minute of unsettling clangs and screeches, which then gradually give way to a long funeral elegy of solemn, oppressive tones, until it fades into a deafening final silence — a clear and effective invitation to reflection.

The same tones and the same weight of meaning permeate "A Waste Of Blood" — dedicated, as the liner notes state, to all the victims of reckless US foreign policy — in which Elliott's piano conspicuously recalls the minimalism and compositional iteration of Sylvain Chauveau, traits onto which a mournful, sinister vocal line is here grafted, destined to coil in on itself in decidedly spectral atmospheres, aided also by the manipulation of the vocal element.

Yet the album's incipit seems designed to stir feelings later belied by the rest of its content, because the opening "C.F. Bundy" first presents a complex, structured weave, through which one can even glimpse a drift towards sounds close to the dreamy soundscapes described by Savoy Grand or Piano Magic (which does, here and there, resurface), soon overtaken by the now-familiar gloomy vocals and by a piano with a cadenced rhythm, which then stays on to accompany accordions and shrill cellos, in a small, baroque "haunted house" folk symphony, before dissolving into an ever slower closing music-box melody. A similar piano theme also underpins the minimal and cinematic "The Guilty Party", whose mood recalls not so much the excited, fleeting euphoria following a cheerful bender, but rather the despair and sense of emptiness that follows a solitary, alcohol-soaked evening spent in some damp, run-down suburban bistrot, close now to closing time.

Somewhat lighter tones emerge where Elliott fully expresses his fondness for a return to a folk, acoustic dimension: thus, on "Whats Wrong" the rhythm becomes less dark, rising into an oblique, swaying rural ballad, played by an eccentric little orchestra capable of carrying the audience along as it recounts nursery rhymes with the dominant accompaniment of an accordion; while the seemingly placid — but no less anguished — "What The Fuck Am I Doing On This Battlefield?" returns to warm, introspective atmospheres through the simple dialogue between the ever-present piano and a Latin-tinged guitar.

Drinking Songs is above all an album of striking dramatic intensity, whose complex aesthetic variety ultimately manages to captivate, even though it still retains certain unresolved elements within Elliott's artistic dimension — by now clearly heading towards a cultured, deeply personal take on modern singer-songwriting, yet still undoubtedly indebted to his experience in assembling acoustic and electronic sounds, an approach which, on closer inspection, still continues to this day, albeit in a profoundly changed expressive register.

Matt Elliott's transformation into a singer-songwriter then finds its consecration on Failing Songs, an album in which, alongside his despairing reflections on human fragility and inevitable fallibility, the artist definitively sets aside the last electronic remnants, devoting his remarkable gift for sonic reworking to a balanced combination of European cultural roots, classical elements and an essentially "post-" sensibility. The close relationship binding Failing Songs to the previous album is evident, beyond the atmospheres and mood, from the very first listen to the choir and opening guitar notes of the spectral ballad of human and political disillusionment "Our Weight In Oil", which clearly echo those of the piano on "The Guilty Party".

But Failing Songs can't simply be dismissed as a sort of second chapter to Drinking Songs, since it seems instead to stem from an even more cohesive conceptual and stylistic matrix, consistently expressed across twelve concise tracks, never overblown, which on one hand revive the disenchanted, swaying "bateau ivre" gait of the choruses ("Our Weight In Oil") and on the other play at alternating antinomies that aren't purely musical, sometimes reducing them to unity – as in the ending of "Chains" and in the fast-slow sequence of the two short pieces "Good Pawn" and "Compassion Fatigue" – and sometimes enriching them with a cinematic dimension that merges French class, continental culture and Mediterranean accents ("The Seance", "The Ghost Of Maria Callas").

In measured yet at the same time feverish compositions with ever-shifting contours, despite the common denominator underlying them, Elliott juxtaposes soundtrack-like settings worthy of Yann Tiersen with elegant pianistic arabesques, woven around the spare basslines of "The Seance" and even the sudden electric surge of the post-rock-tinged swell that nonetheless preludes the quiet acoustic ending of "Desamparado". Alongside these multiple facets, another focal point of the record lies in its modern reworking of European folk traditions, whose quotations always seem the fruit of genuine cultural depth rather than an uncritical, somewhat "formulaic" influence. Thus, even the gypsy dance of "The Failing Song" – whose vivacity clashes jarringly with lyrics speaking of “aspirations turned to ashes in our hands” – comes across stripped of any garish ornament and steeped in a decadent grace that doesn't fade even in the whirling finale, which then tapers off into a few piano notes, while it's a limpid, Latin-tinged guitar that frames the shifting rhythms and seamless harmonic integration of "Broken Bones", a track of hushed, quivering melancholy. It's precisely here, as well as in "Good Pawn" and in the gloomy, maudit-like atmospheres of the hazy "Lone Gunman Required", that Elliott displays all the qualities of a refined chansonnier who, combined with the orchestral intensity of the compositions, finds one of the few possible points of comparison in the intricate romanticism of early Tindersticks.

And if the wealth of styles found on Failing Songs weren't enough, it's worth pointing out that Elliott even dusts off his original post-rock roots here, perceptible in part in the already-mentioned "Desamparado" and roughly expressed in "Chains", where the vocal component shifts from composed to jagged, like the lopsided choruses of Silver Mt. Zion, depicting a grim fate of inescapable servitude, while the sonic backdrop also grows harsher and more dissonant, wrapping itself in a distorted, funereal brass-band whirlwind in which impetuous electric spasms, dark horns and shrill violins collide.

The common thread running through every track remains the author's subtle torment, expressed each time in different ways yet all equally anguished, even when, towards the end of the album, an acceptance of the inevitability of fate seems to take hold, conveyed in "Gone", a circular and surprisingly limpid ballad built on the hypnotic repetition "we will be gone", and in the airy, rhythmic interplay of chorus, guitar and violin in the classically-inflected, subversive madrigal "Planting Seeds" – almost a fading summary of the record's essence, tapering off into a final minute of solo piano, over which one can imagine the closing credits rolling on the desperate comédie humaine depicted in all the preceding passages.

The elements described so far, along with countless other small gems scattered through its tracks, make Failing Songs a splendid confirmation of Matt Elliott's refined artistic sensibility; like all confirmations, it lacks some of the immediacy that comes with the element of surprise, yet it only takes a little attentive listening to the many sharp sonic solutions within its tracks to conclude that this is an even more accomplished, carefully crafted and moving work than the already excellent Drinking Songs.

With the third chapter of his songs trilogy, Matt Elliott closes the circle on an artistic chapter that has by now lasted quite some time, one that has seen him recast the sonic manipulations of his Third Eye Foundation days through refined and anguished folk mutations.

Elliott's restless human journey and his attentiveness to the world around him still go hand in hand with his musical inspiration: thus, while the two previous albums represented a surrender to a bleak and desperate worldview, in the face of which nothing remained but the pitiless yet resigned acknowledgment of an inescapable fate, Howling Songs shows, right from its title, an equally tormented reaction to a reality that once again stirs up deep inner turmoil.

Here too, the record's musical profile mirrors its ideological and narrative components, grafting onto the search for an oblique, Euro-Mediterranean-rooted folk sound some stinging electric incursions, which seem to want to express a sense of irremediable disillusionment and defeat, translating the deconstructions of his early work through the artist's current sensibility.

Here Elliott processes his sense of affliction into compositions that are largely restless, which beneath a partial and only apparent surface continuity remain instead subject to the unpredictable movements of the soul, driven to musically shifting outcomes precisely by the added electric variable, which joins the dialogue between an indolent gypsy-Hispanic guitar and arrangements worthy of a refined Mitteleuropean chamber orchestra. The first telling example of this approach comes right from the opening track: "The Kübler-Ross Model" – whose title, just to give an idea of the mood, refers to the psychological model describing the five stages of reaction to a terminal diagnosis – weaves a tapestry over eleven minutes long, built incrementally in the usual aching gait, through hypnotically circular melodies, sung almost under one's breath but shaken by the sudden eruption of two electric spasms that, exploding and then receding, divert the track into a whirlwind of claustrophobic drama.

A similarly harsh, if not even more pronounced, expressive edge marks the other predominantly electric tracks, ranging from the hazy, oppressive mood of the moving "Something About Ghosts" to the harrowing post-folk of "The Howling Song", via the gripping shifts in register of "A Broken Flamenco".

Alongside the angry howl, though, there's still room for a couple of fragments dense with romanticism ("How Much In Blood?", "Song For A Failed Relationship") and, above all, for gloomy acoustic chansons, through which the intimate sense of defeat and the same expressive urgency underlying Elliott's music clearly shine through. “Can’t sing to keep myself from falling/ it always comes without a warning” he sings softly indeed over the three minutes of the nostalgic “Berlin & Bisenthal”, a prelude to a ballad of rare intensity and lyricism (“I Name This Ship The Tragedy, Bless Her & All Who Sail With Her”), which, in tone, themes and drunken sway, could stand as a symbol of what Elliott has sought to represent in this phase of his output, as man, artist and witness to a decadent post-modernity tragically drifting toward a hopeless shipwreck, accompanied by the illusory, obsessive refrain “we’ll sail on again, we’ll sail on again”.

Sealing the completion of Elliott's “songs” trilogy, a lavish box set was released at the end of 2009 which, alongside the three final albums, includes a fourth disc, emblematically titled Failed Songs, collecting outtakes from the same recording sessions. Although presented as a collection of “failed songs”, albeit not reduced to the mere status of “unfinished” pieces, Failed Songs reveals a sort of common denominator in the bare-bones quality of its harmonic structures and in that same sense of surrender and indolence underlying the first Drinking Songs in particular, from whose recording sessions most of its seven tracks were in fact drawn.

In the only two sung pieces (“Mellow” and “South Canadian Sea”), as well as in the majestic brass-band progression of “Lament”, we find the same mood and dramatic quality of lopsided choruses, (dis)harmonic gaits, and that broad catalogue of Euro-Mediterranean musical traditions capable of blending bolero and austere madrigals, sirtaki and bittersweet gypsy dances. As befits “failed songs”, not all of the unreleased material here can be considered finished, since, amid occasional deconstructions and phrasing steeped in melancholy introspection, one clearly senses that, with a bit more work, Elliott could have drawn enough material from some of these tracks for another album altogether.

But evidently, for the restless Bristol-based artist, the time had again come to shed his skin, to bring to a close the extraordinary five-year span devoted to the Songs trilogy and prepare to resurrect his original alias, Third Eye Foundation.

Labels aside, what's striking about Matt Elliott's constant evolution is his ability to keep questioning himself, both as a man and as an artist, tending to every element with meticulous care in order to produce a work that is forthright and deeply personal, whose underlying rationale ultimately lies in an uncommon inner energy, both human and intellectual, that outlines the clear profile of a modern artist capable of expressing, through remarkable formal variety, the anguished testimony of the present moment – and not merely from a strictly musical standpoint.

With the "Songs" chapter closed, after almost a decade, the Bristol artist dusts off his Third Eye Foundation alias for an album, The Dark, on which he returns to manipulating electronic textures, paying particular attention to the communicative languages that had developed in the meantime since Matt Elliott had abandoned his post-industrial deconstructions.

The album is a single forty-minute sonic monolith, split into five movements that are distinct yet lack any real break in continuity, building in a progressive crescendo of pathos, hypnotic tension and rhythmic sequences. Backed by long-time collaborator Chris Cole and young French talent Chapelier Fou, Matt Elliott builds from organic loops and electronic pulses to depict the alienation of the contemporary world through beats, rough lashes and a relentless march of urgent segmentations, dubstep hybridisations and jungle frequencies, which derail into an orgy of destructured sounds and booming, filtered guitars.

Although moments of respite aren't entirely absent, such as the decadent touches that close the spectral "Pareidolia", the whole work behaves like a sequence of increasingly harsh and dramatic rhythmic progressions, running in symbolic parallel with the advance of a narrative arc that, though forgoing words, pushes ever deeper into the terrifying recesses of a postmodern world populated by demons embodied in warped vocal fragments and instrumental shifts that are at times quite abrupt. Throughout The Dark, the disorientation of contemporary life is rendered through a sudden new shift of expressive paradigms, whose apparent stylistic break corresponds to a substantial continuity in Elliott's narrative of desperate moral drift, which now no longer seems to call for drunken songs and dirges, but for stinging contortions and oppressive beats.

Four years after the close of the "Songs" experience, Matt Elliott returns with The Broken Man.

On this record, one of Elliott's starkest works, what matters most is the expressive mode rather than any striking signatures like the flamenco-flourished fingerpicking or, on the other hand, the recognisable sonic and structural trademarks of his work. While most of the tracks on Songs could be appreciated simply for their "staging" — for the faithful reconstruction not only of a feeling but of an imagery, however personal and not always clearly identifiable — on The Broken Man every veil falls away and all that remains is Matt, prey to a pain that, while once seen as an inevitable accompaniment to his music, now becomes the very centre of his songs.

Beneath the constant acoustic vibrations, the arrangements (the album is produced by Yann Tiersen) and the characteristic choral contributions escort us through icy explorations of a desolate soul, a grey plain crossed by Elliott's Cohen-esque whisper. The funeral farewell of "This Is For", the inexorable withering of "How To Kill A Rose", the dance with Death in "The Pain That's Yet To Come" make up interludes, preludes to an inner storm looming in the background that finally breaks loose in the record's load-bearing tracks: "If Anyone Tells Me…" and "How We Fell".

The first, a thirteen-minute piano piéce, amid distant bell tolls and faint breaths of violin, leads us through paths of almost physical prostration, alternating dark, blind recesses of unresolvable sorrow with glimpses of modest beauty — in the first part — and with barely concealed fury over the nostalgia for something now lost, which gradually fades into resignation.

It is, in short, a diary of an existential feeling, the one sketched out by Elliott, carved with an extreme sense of rigour and inevitability, yet also of elegance, in the face of which even the harshest listener cannot remain unmoved, or at least will have to suspend judgement.

But, from a musical standpoint and in terms of narrative intensity, the only track truly worth noting is the central one just discussed. Across the rest of the record it's harder to recognise the flair that has always set the English songwriter's music apart.

Matt Elliott's dilemma is making his new emotional and creative state credible: behind the flamenco chords and Parisian atmospheres that have seeped into what remains of his fingerpicking, there lies an awareness leaning more towards disenchantment and a passion for music, almost as if it represented his last anchor of spiritual salvation.

This is the drive behind Only Myocardial Infarction Can Break Your Heart: far from the desperate final cry of The Broken Man, Matt has rediscovered the pleasure of sharing his pain and opens the rooms of his imaginary house to new guests and unprecedented, richer and more sophisticated arrangements.

The promised flashes of optimism can be felt in the unusual sweetness of "De Nada" and the gentle simplicity of "Reap What You Snow", but not in the eccentric cover art, which, breaking the splendid run of illustrations from previous albums, offers an image full of crisp, fake colours, almost signalling the lexical deception of the album's title (an unlikely event that becomes very likely).

As on The Broken Man, there is a gravitational centre whose intensity threatens to overshadow the quality of the remaining tracks, namely "The Right To Cry", a memorable melodic line that slots effortlessly into the showcase of Matt's finest creations.

What's thrilling is the mastery Elliott has achieved in handling few elements to reach just the right climax. Like a new Leonard Cohen, he tells of a desperate, wandering humanity, but no longer through the revolutionary, angry gaze of a kid from the English suburbs, rather through the reflections of a kaleidoscope of cultures and experiences, yearning to reassert the centrality of humankind against the misleading logic of a technocratic society.

The titles of the album's two most significant tracks ("I Would Have Woken You With This Song" and "Prepare for Disappointment") sound like a desperate last attempt to communicate the awakening of consciousness: the pain of existence, which Matt Elliott has desperately translated into music, becomes the only escape route from normality — anguish and panic offer more excitement than the pleasant everyday life made up of banality and advertising deceit.

The more relaxed sounds of Only Myocardial Infarction Can Break Your Heart are nonetheless a consequence of his extended stay in France and his boundless love for classical guitar. Matt Elliott's new path promises to play with lighter, more personal feelings: from intimate sentiment will come the new revolution, so be ready.

The Calm Before, the new chapter in this epic that is always new in form and always the same in spirit, finds its whole reason for being in the title track, taking on tones that are more crystalline than ever. Paradoxically, the calm before the storm is not experienced here as an omen of imminent doom, but as salvation itself. Elliott deliberately sets aside his tragic mask and opens his arms to a necessary, long-awaited deluge, which makes its way through with immense elegance.

Granted, the sense of the ineluctable has always obsessively pervaded every one of Elliott's ballads, but never before has it been accompanied by such grace, by a lyricism so at peace with the anguish that can sometimes make living an unbearable burden.

The spare guitar arpeggios are complemented by piano and double bass, which together form a sort of jazz trio propelled by a quiet rhythm section, where every hammer strike and every vibrato is given ample room to resonate.

A momentary detour, albeit a significant one, within an expressive path so tormented and seemingly unable to pick itself back up from its falls. "I Only Wanted To Give You Everything" is a worthy return to the slow-motion tangos of the 2000s, the tearful acceptance of unrequited love. Then brass makes a fresh entrance, a prelude to a diabolical, alternating-current flamenco that declaims the fall of thrones and crowns, of angels in any case destined to lose their wings ("Wings & Crown"). Finally, a closing track that echoes the mood and notes of the title track: the allegory of the cave as a habitat predetermined by a law of nature that confines outsiders to eternal solitude, waiting for the sign that will reveal to them the ultimate meaning of that inextinguishable mal du siècle, an instant before the thunder.

Every return of Third Eye Foundation, however sporadic, is never random, and seems to carry the full emotional and "moral" weight of the time spent in silence. Seven years after the ashen The Dark, the dark atmospheres of Wake The Dead have now become one with the asphalt of the metropolis evoked by Burial and Dälek, a malaise already familiar though invisible, that creeps along undisturbed and unannounced.

The opening title track is among the most potent syntheses of Elliott's instrumental déséspoir: the funeral rites are led from the front by the lament of a female lyrical voice, followed by a mournful brass fanfare; Raphaël Séguinier's drums mark the tempo of the unredeemed, contemporary Sodom, amid analogue manipulations, scratching and subcutaneous synths à la Reznor — elements also brought into play by David Chalmin.

The illbient and dub-style rhythmic traits emerge more clearly starting from "The Blasted Tower", set against tearful string textures in the vein of Silver Mt. Zion and further intersections of vocal samples. "Controlled Demolition" instead opens with a harsher attack, at least until the cello restores the dramatically lyrical balance of the whole.

The intent and inspiration behind Wake The Dead are, by Elliott's own admission, to "make souls dance, to unite them, and to remind us that, despite our individual choices and beliefs, we are all part of the same whole and that, alive or dead, we are forever bound together." But more than the words, it's the intensity of these scant forty minutes that reveals an expressive achievement with few equals in Third Eye Foundation's history.

Matt Elliott returns to releasing music under his own name with a "non-album", a simple collection of sketches improvised over the last three years, exclusively instrumental, intended to be revisited and developed further at a later stage. As he himself is keen to point out, Songs Of Resignation is not a Matt Elliott album, it's its opposite." Despite the deliberately unpolished production, the musician's most authentic spirit comes through, as he improvises in the most disparate moments, capturing feelings that — as Elliott notes — are impossible to recreate later with a cool head. Hence the decision to release this stream of consciousness unaltered, tracks that will never see the light of day but which, nonetheless, have an identity of their own. The repetitive cycle of the seasons ("Spring", "Summer", "Cold"), the desperate prayer with no god to answer it ("Prayer"), the classic folk song for losers ("Song For Your Futur Solitude"), whether drunks or vagrants makes little difference, through to the powerless rage of "Va Te Faire Foutre", all follow the path that Elliott's poetry and guitar have already trodden over the years. "Songs Of Resignation" will probably be remembered as a small taste of a forthcoming solo work, a welcome gift for those who have long followed the melancholy poetry of the Bristol musician with passion.

In 2020 he returns with Farewell To All We Know, an LP that confirms him as the author of a philosophy, of a peculiar way of thinking about and approaching life. After the taverns, the existential voids to be filled with music, with a voice now reduced to a mere sigh, today he seems to find himself facing a definitive farewell, a farewell to the whole past, to our defeats and our victories. Hence the poetry of the title track, once again a sign of otherness with respect to the world as it is, a testimony of difference, a withdrawal from politics and social media ("farewell to the liars and to those who will distort the truth"), a farewell to all the memories and past events that weigh on our present like boulders ("farewell to all we know, all we've let go, all we'll never find, all we've loved"), right down to the realization that life is too great an event for our capabilities ("we were never equipped to survive").

The chant of "Crisis Apparition", with its austere ending, seems to leave no room for hope in Elliott's philosophy, but it's right at the tail end that the twist arrives. In "The Worst Is Over", the worst is indeed over, the guitar becomes faster and more vital, the piano follows the chords and the clouds now seem swept away. But Elliott adds doubt, the "maybe", leaving this new, cautious optimism hanging in the balance ("the worst is over, the worst is over, maybe").

The End Of Days (2023) seems to be the work closest to the acknowledged milestone Drinking Songs, a true sacred monster that every one of his works is forced to measure itself against. Elliott's music relentlessly continues along its path, keeping any notion of evolution to a minimum (at least apparently), maintaining an absolute consistency that seems more commendable than attempts at change for change's sake. The End Of Days is thus a new, sighed-out cry, a new funeral elegy for a man with no community living in an ever more hostile world. The tavern songs become songs from beyond the grave, borrowing from the funeral jazz of New Orleans.

"Flowers For Bea", in twelve minutes, takes us right back to the streets of tragic 1920s Louisiana, where jazz sprouted under the heel of racism. Guitar, piano and horns fully recreate that world: the Mississippi Delta catapulted into Elliott's typically solitary poetics. The title track opens with a guitar-and-piano melody very similar to a drinking song (much like the deeply sad "January's Song"), but even darker after eighteen years of defeats and disillusionment. Everything is lost for Elliott, and the only possible medicine is to sigh the truth in as low a voice as possible, in the hope that some kindred spirit might hear and understand it. The final two minutes, dominated by an anguished sax, are among the most desperate (and therefore most authentic) moments in the British composer's body of work.

This use of sax appears to be the real novelty compared to previous works, a novelty that opens up new possibilities Elliott has only just begun to explore, already with excellent results. We'll see what the (slow) evolution of his music has in store for us next.

Contributions from Lorenzo Righetto ("The Broken Man"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Only Myocardial Infarction Can Break Your Heart"), Michele Palozzo ("The Calm Before", "Wake The Dead"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("Songs Of Resignation", "Farewell To All We Know", "The End Of Days")

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