ELLIS ISLAND SOUND - The Good Seed

Chamber and instrumental folk, tinged with pastoral romanticism and an austere, nostalgic freshness. That's what Ellis Island Sound bring us, a British collective built around the figures of David Sheppard (guitar) and Pete Astor (ukulele and kazoo). Surrounding them, a small ensemble of seven musicians, handling percussion, violin, viola, sax, trombone, lap steel guitar, harmonium, melodica, and whatever else you can think of!

A small fairground of folk wonders, intimate but never dowdy, always ready to fill itself with magic, carrying us — even if just for a little over three quarters of an hour — into a parallel dimension, into the enchanted places of Penguin Café Orchestra ("Angel’s Way", "Count The Cars"), grappling with daydreams that seem to take flight from the most dreamy musings of Beirut ("Auction Of Promises") or with the low-flying leaps of imagination that do the heart good before anything else ("The Villagers"). The imaginary landscapes are those of distant, perhaps unexplored villages; villages that still manage to keep intact the joyful/playful force ("Cuckoo Hill", "Building A Table") of music that, even when it evokes feelings of irreparable loss ("Sword Reversed", "Dark lane"), never stops kindling wonder at small things, as if it were still, for the umpteenth time, the first time.

Alongside the memory that cuts deep, then, comes a euphoria attuned to the exotic calls of Third Ear Band ("Density Ratio"): the sound expands the perspective, the rhythm takes hold of the body, but gently — and the whole world really is a small village. It's a tiny, tiny record: it almost seems to need affection, someone to save it from oblivion. A record that invents nothing and doesn't want to invent anything; that doesn't chase the showy flourish and doesn't shout at the top of its lungs the need to notice, every now and then, the boundaries of one's own heart.

"Unwinding Not Unravelling" then unveils a light synthetic pulse, closely tracing the delicate arabesques of strings and guitar; "The Waveny Waltz" is a tray of delights for swaying heads and visions of dreamlike, impossible better worlds, while in "The Orchid" High Llamas wave a little hand in greeting. Like when you fall in love and they say butterflies flutter in your stomach: that's a bit the feeling you get listening to these delicate sketches, capable of stopping time on the threshold of a past more mythical than real.

But there's also room for experiments poised between minor hypotheses of fourth-world music and dub luminescence ("Summoning The Pharoah"), tails-wagging banjos having the time of their lives ("Last Days Of John Train") and hypnotic minimalism ("Starlight Madrigal") that couldn't close the record any better — and, I don't know about you, but I really can't bring myself to abandon it to today's hyper-production music machine.

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02/10/2007