Boduf Songs - Whisper of a lonely demon

An elusive artist from Southampton, Mat Sweet is not simply another addition to the sad, depressive singer-songwriter lineage, nor is he the product of a calculated, market-tested lo-fi aesthetic of the kind that has often found success in recent years. With his alter ego Boduf Songs, since the mid-2000s, Sweet instead represents one of the finest examples of contemporary hushed, dark and enveloping minimalism, in his case born from nothing more than an artistic sensibility translated into spare songwriting and bare sonic settings, reduced to the essentials of an acoustic guitar, barely supported by distant samples or drones.

Solitary and mysterious - due to the initial absence of photographs and biographical information - the English artist proves remarkably ambitious right from the start: a complete unknown, he sent his first demo to a label with the kind of pedigree boasted by Chicago's Kranky. The nine sonic sketches it contained impressed the label's staff so much that, shortly after, they were faithfully turned into his self-titled debut album, without any changes, production work or re-recording.

The lo-fi, "bedroom music" immediacy comes through fully across the scant half hour of Boduf Songs, and through it one can also glimpse the setting in which the album was created: the intimate isolation of an author grappling with his inspiration and the few technical means at his disposal, sheltered from the all-too-easily-imagined grey landscape of southern England, among wind-battered bare trees and a nature whose contours are harsh yet sublime at the same time. Sweet's music shares those very same contours, suspended between a singer-songwriter approach worthy of the most depressed Kozelek and a conceptual leaning towards a stark rural psychedelia, one that weaves dark electronic components into the most crystalline acoustic textures, achieving a depth of substance perhaps never matched since the days of the Flying Saucer Attack's "Further".

The record's flow traces a journey through a cursed forest, its atmosphere growing ever darker and more morbid, framed by the notes of a spartan guitar whose fastidious, plodding advance reeks of pain and unease, while a cutting electronics disfigures the rare interludes of apparent harmonic sweetness.

The journey of exhausting melancholy opens with the touching "Puke A Pitch Black Rainbow To": a single piano note feeds the shadows, a battered voice whispers its poetry, and icy electronic gusts inflict a pain that is persistent and pleasurable at once.

The following "Claimant Reclaimed" is a further step into the underworld, with a frantic, incessant guitar chord repeated slavishly, alternating with shifts in tone and a searing electronic tear. There's still room, however, for vaguely ambient interludes ("Our Canon Of Transportation") and disorienting folk mantras that paint a pitch-black sky ("This One Is Cursed"). While Sweet's slow-folk takes on sharper contours in the mystic timbres of "Lost In Forests" and "Grains", small cracks of light and melodic linearity appear too, even if shot through with prolonged silences, drone incursions and the swaying of a ferrous, grating, completely arrhythmic sound.

Boduf Songs is not a record for happy souls - it's an oblivion of darkness, made of mumbled litanies, listless acoustic arpeggios and abrasive dissonances; a work steeped in pain and suffering, the narration of a fantastical, mysterious inner universe, through sounds that can be delicate and sinuous, but more often prickly and forbidding.

Between sending off the demo and the time needed for its official release, Mat Sweet laid the groundwork for an immediate follow-up to the homemade roughness of his debut. And so the next album, Lion Devours The Sun, arrived barely a year after the first, matching it with nine tracks stripped to the bone, built on the iteration of a few simple guitar chords, steeped in anguished soundscapes suspended between urban desolation and isolationist ascesis. Sweet's voice remains shadowy, though it persistently reaches for hesitant melodies capable of at least partly balancing the dark unease blanketing the album's slow flow. The result is once again an apparent stillness enveloping frail compositions of merciless introspection, in which a timid ray of sunlight surfaces only occasionally, if anything to emphasize the contrast with an unvarying melancholy that almost never tips over into oppressive gloom.

The descent into the new dark spiral of Lion Devours The Sun begins with distant beats and the obsessive arpeggios that introduce "Lord Of The Flies", a sinister circular ballad in which Sweet's voice, reduced to little more than a whisper, immediately conjures ghosts and unsettling visions ("around your heart, dark wings beat") of a rotten reality, spawned from "seeds of death, lost, disease", while the few notes of a guitar with an austere folk flavour flow almost indifferently and clear, the sole constant counterpoint to the album's misty atmospheres throughout. In case the mood wasn't already clear enough, "Two Across The South" broadens the musical spectrum further, introducing an intro of ambient distortion onto which feelings of dejected fatalism graft themselves (the song's first and last lines are: "I built a house from my mistakes"), while the skeletal arrangements of "That Angel Was Pretty Lame" sketch faint echoes of the dark-folk scene (chiefly Current 93) through metallic field recordings and dismembered clangs. Elements that fold into one another and progressively hybridize, explode, implode, and drag themselves out for a good six minutes of mysterious ecstasy.

Over the course of the record the pace slows down even further, yet without ever granting a moment of release, nor a passage where anything resembling a melody surfaces; just slowness, timbres, or rather whispers, yearnings, fragments of an incomplete or simply unfathomable picture, one that depicts the suffering that leads to redemption through dense drones and digital laments ("Please Ache For Redemptive"). The conclusion is reserved for the longest and boldest composition, "Bell For Harness": almost ten minutes of notes paced with exhausting calm, an apparent compositional peace cut down by the voice, a looming, continuous, ever-building yearning, always on the verge of exploding but never quite allowing itself to. This is the most extreme and tangible proof of how, in Mat Sweet's bleak vision, hope is neither contemplated nor even deemed necessary, dispersed amid the measured flow of the track and the listless, resigned mantra "is your last lonely drive?".

A work of shifting, fearsome tonalities, yet dense with a harsh human warmth in its total refusal of sweetening, Lion Devours The Sun offers a coherent testament to the raw vitality of Mat Sweet and his gradual growth in expressive fluidity, moving beyond the mere lo-fi shell toward a style of writing that, without abandoning the murky atmospheres of the debut, develops them into an unsettling communicative dimension.

Boduf Songs' artistic journey thus seems aimed toward a mature evolution in isolationist songwriting, marked by anguished, alienating atmospheres that are nonetheless tending to become "cleaner". The next step in this direction arrives two years later, when Mat Sweet returns to broadcast sonic dispatches from his solitary home deep in the countryside, on the third album How Shadows Chase The Balance.

The sense of isolation is if anything heightened, since for this record Mat Sweet favoured the night hours, with the declared aim of minimizing background noise in the recordings and, consequently, of surrounding himself with an even more intimate, close-knit setting, whose silence is filled only with measured acoustic spirals and his shadowy singing.

These premises generate, not surprisingly, an album with structures that are, if anything, even more stripped-down than usual, with Mat Sweet reworking the essential elements of his music, juxtaposing them to emphasize their harsher edges, sometimes brought to the fore, sometimes compressed to make room for an unprecedented melodic streak. Alongside the usual slow-motion litanies that draw you into a bleak, dreamlike mood, How Shadows Chase The Balance shows a gradual evolution toward a number of possible destinations. The bare folk elements of Boduf Songs' music, on one hand, take on lighter acoustic touches that surface in proper songs with clean guitar and more clearly defined melodies ("I Can't See A Thing In Here", "A Spirit Harness", "Last Glimmer On A Hill At Dusk"); on the other, they shed their original character altogether, taking on a ritualistic dimension in cumulative compositions that spill into spectral mantras ("Don't forget to fall apart/ don't forget to come undone"), never so close to depressive, gothic shades.

Even given the overall heightened melodic sensibility, what remains constant is a grieving spirit, sharpened by a lo-fi element that is here cleaner than in the past, but still adds a cutting edge to the repressed gloom radiating from every track. What has partly changed, then, is not so much the sense of authentic, only partially vented suffering, but rather its expression — smoother and more melodic, made somewhat more accessible through a tempered sonic destructuring and a more mature songwriting ability, testifying to the enigmatic English artist's full transition into a proper singer-songwriter.

Fresh off a tour and — apparently — the start of a relationship with Jessica Bailiff, Mat Sweet arrives at his fourth album, staying true to creative isolation and to the bare-bones instrumentation through which his anguished compositions and whispered humming are originally captured. This Alone Above All Else In Spite Of Everything is likewise born at home, with nothing but a microphone for technical support; nonetheless, it turns out to be far more complex than its predecessors, not only because it follows a line of progressive sonic refinement at the post-production stage, but above all because the enigmatic English artist's evolutionary path reaches a new peak of instrumental articulation and expressive variety.

Murky shades and lyrics of harsh hallucination now find support in more fluid, melodically cohesive songwriting and, above all, are enriched by sonic settings no longer limited to elongated guitar notes and electronic inserts, but including decisive electric forays, as well as piano, electronics and rhythm tracks.

And it is with a spectral piano-and-voice composition that This Alone Above All Else In Spite Of Everything opens; this is not, however, the introduction to a work of muffled intimacy, since the first jarring jolts arrive already in the following "Decapitation Blues", whose liquid-calm opening of gentle vibraphone touches is torn apart by an impetuous electric eruption that hurls it into an incandescent vortex streaked with noise-rock shrapnel.

An exasperating slowness takes shape and materializes with sweet insolence (the drops of sorrow in "Absolutely Null And Utterly Void", seven minutes of pure rarefaction for "The Giant Umbilical Cord That Connects Your Brain To The Centre"), while elsewhere previously hidden sides come to light, such as the timbral and tonal range of Mat's voice ("I Have Decided To Pass Through Matter") or strongly innovative structures capable of conjuring a kind of hallucinated goth-rock (the gorgeous, sulphurous guitars of "They Get On Slowly").

Beyond the small differences already mentioned, compared to the past one can sense a purer, more crystalline, less lo-fi guitar tone. This helps bring out the beauty of an inspired fingerpicking style — not virtuosic but skeletal, visibly matured and crystalline.

Here too this is a work that isn't easy to approach, requiring commitment and dedication to be appreciated in all its many nuances; yet once again, the effort spent immersing oneself in Boduf Songs' sonic world is repaid with unique sensations, confirming every impression formed over the five years since the first, eponymous acoustic miracle that set in motion an enchantment that continues to haunt our dreams.

Arriving at the fifth album of a career thus far nurtured with care and dedication by a historic label such as Kranky, the Southampton musician found himself facing a decisive turning point. Spurred by the move across the ocean to be with his partner Jessica Bailiff and by the need for new expressive vehicles for his music, Burnt Up On Re-Entry (2013) marks the move from the Chicago label to London's Southern (a label that has been home to names such as Babes In Toyland and Geoff Farina's Karate), but also the full transition toward a fierce, aggressive sound never before expressed with such conviction.

Angry guitars, turbulent noise and a decent rock edge had already surfaced on other occasions, especially on the previous This Alone Above All Else In Spite Of Everything, where the electric charge allowed itself much more than the odd fleeting cameo. That approach, only timidly encouraged at the time, is pushed to its extreme consequences in this new phase of Mat Sweet's career: the abrasive electric guitar that bursts in with its almost metal edge right in the middle of "Fiery The Angels Fell" doesn't even give you time to say "good morning" before already revealing much of the record's dynamics.

The vocal tone, which indeed has never changed, remains catatonic, never rising much above a whisper. Sweet, besides injecting his music with hefty doses of rock, plays the card of rhythmic electronic manipulation, achieving a result not unlike certain Southern Lord-style doom-folk. Sounds and melodies no longer take on the guise of dramatic pastoral folk as in the past: on "Burnt Up On Re-Entry" the alienation is total, yes, but takes on more human tones, loosens up, leaves room for the odd glimmer of light. On tracks like "Song To Keep Me Still" and "A Brilliant Shaft Of Light From Out Of The Night Sky", the guitar chords and overall rhythm thus take on the shape of Waits-style torch songs: no longer a slow descent but a gradual, painful ascent.

So it's small-but-significant variations that come into play within a formula that's well established and hard to dislodge: substantial electronic flourishes (synth and drum machine on the tense "Vermin, Rend Thy Garments"), even a robotic voice on "Drexelius Sick Man Quarles Emblemes Closed Heaven", nods to the old way of doing things ("Everyone Will Let You Down In The End", "Long Divider") and the new rock vein that takes over (the electric charges of "Between The Palisades And The Firmament").

Overall, though, it does seem that Burnt Up On Re-Entry is a transitional album, something Sweet clearly worked hard on but which struggles to find its own identity. Never less than solid in quality, the Englishman's new effort shows signs of change that haven't yet fully taken shape. One hopes for a definitive turn on the next record: Boduf Songs' music deserves a far wider recognition.

Contributions by Vassilios Karagiannis (“Burnt Up On Re-Entry”)

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