YELLOW6 - Painted Sky

For over ten years now, English guitarist Jon Attwood has been producing, under the moniker Yellow6, a balanced interweaving of minimal electronics, drone and dreamy harmonic textures that evades any rigid "genre" classification, drawing, in its various forms, on both melancholic dream-pop and an enveloping ambient refinement. His discography is practically endless, between official albums and countless collaborations and self-releases, to which must be added the extremely limited annual Christmas cd-rs titled "Merry 6mas", as well as the imposing three-cd collection "The Beautiful Season Has Past", released last year on the RROOPP label, which can undoubtedly serve as an excellent starting point for anyone wanting to approach Yellow6's music.

With "Painted Sky", Attwood follows up the moving "Melt Inside" from 2005, temporarily leaving behind Make Mine Music (which he founded together with Scott Sinfield, aka Portal) for the ever-reliable Resonant, an ideal home for his predominantly slow, expansive compositions permeated by moderate experimentation, which, even within their guitar-based textures, retain pronounced emotional potential, broadly traceable to the British reworking of the post-rock experience.

Two elements immediately stand out compared to "Melt Inside": beyond the synthetic filtering of the guitar and the presence, albeit inconsistent, of the drum machine, there's less room for "pure" electronics; then, there's no vocal trace at all, with the contribution of Ally Todd now gone, who had added an enchanted charm and extra human warmth to some tracks on that album. Moreover, Attwood's constant instrumental work tends, especially on the two opening tracks, to take on greater bulk than in the past, with guitars roaring slowly in distortions almost entirely stripped of electronic nuance. Thus, the hypnotic calm induced by the drowsy arpeggios and distant ambient rarefactions of "I Know I Shouldn't (But I Do)" is disturbed by small spasms of moderately harsh frequencies, while the iteration of liquid guitar sounds, drone and reverb on "I Loved You More Before I Knew You Loved Me" creates an elusive sonic blanket, swaying between a soothing melody and faintly surfacing rough edges.

Symmetrically, the two closing tracks also present an equally "concrete" impact, with their dry rhythms and fragmented post-rock features, which in "Maré" overlap with a languid sound, gradually transformed into reverb and finally into distortion, and in "Azure" meet a twisted electronics, still peppered with slight distortions, giving rise to an intricate harmony that isn't without its rough edges.

If these are the extremes of "Painted Sky", it's in the album's substantial middle section that Attwood best expresses the well-established melancholic, dreamlike traits of his sound. The mere emergence of the drum machine's pulsing beat is enough to give "Common" an austere momentum, with languid yet sturdier-than-ever guitars letting nostalgic atmospheres take over, setting the stage for the scant three minutes of "NYE 2", which finds Attwood trying his hand at piano, in a fragment of modern, stretched-out romanticism easily comparable to productions on labels like Type Records. A distant melancholy and hushed introspection also pervade the two most distinctly ambient episodes, placed at the heart of the album: "Pleasure/Pain", with its delicate arpeggios suspended over a persistent cosmic distortion, and "Realisation", where a few languorous guitar notes merge into a hypnotic, nocturnal whole, gently filtered through synths.

But that's not all, because Attwood again gives free rein to the warm emotionality of his compositions, almost repressed in some of the tracks, in the splendid "Eighteen Days" — eight minutes of spectral urban melodies, between muffled, fading rhythms and vital pulses that dissolve latent suggestions, giving them real, vibrant form — and in the following, limpid "Requiem For Julian", whose gentle, bucolic pace conjures the ghost of Piano Magic, already evoked several times before, almost quoting the chords of "You And John Are Birds".

It's above all tracks like these that fully express the essence of Yellow6's music, outlining the qualities of an artist who manages to be incisive and original simply by combining and reworking, through slow but steady movements, a handful of instrumental elements, whether played live or filtered through electronics.

So, "Painted Sky", despite a slightly rougher approach on some tracks, is once again an album to be discovered step by step, listen after listen, since beneath an only apparent difficulty it's able to reveal a host of different sonic and emotional landscapes, by which one can genuinely risk being pleasantly swept away.

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30/03/2007