SLEEPING ME - Cradlesongs

Australia's Hidden Shoal confirms its "cult" reputation as a forward-thinking label for discovering new artists exploring ambient and post-rock territories, with the debut album from Californian guitarist Clayton McEvoy, already active as a collaborator on kindred projects such as Refractors (whose collection recently came out on Dynamophone) and Portugal's Jorge Mantas, aka The Beautiful Schizophonic.

The debut work of McEvoy's personal project, Sleeping Me, surveys the many shades of a music built on subtle rarefactions and temporal expansions, without simply confining itself to stylistic exercises centred on the dosing and crafting of guitar notes, in the vein of the most classic guitar-ambience.

Although the soft, dreamy incipit of "Cradlesongs" explicitly recalls the cadenced chords of Yellow6, the McEvoy compositions that follow that blueprint are not only few in number but also subject to markedly emotional iterations and crescendos; while across the record's three quarters of an hour a variety of registers alternate, not always easy to grasp at first, yet dotted with a continuous interplay of acoustic sounds, faint distortions, piano cameos and string inserts, now in the form of scattered notes, now enveloped in full-blown drones.

Aside from the more restless, distortion-laced swells of "Invasive Gravel Road", the album sketches a series of impalpable landscapes, crossed by gentle ripples and rendered luminous by an approach steeped in enveloping romanticism, which in tracks like "First Cell, First Love" and "Tired Hearts" once again conjures the hazy Icelandic expanses of Stafrænn Hákon and, in part, the gentler side of Sigur Rós too.

In carrying out this operation, McEvoy pairs his measured guitar reverberations with acoustic sounds that help cloak cinematic-flavoured synthetic modulations in warm tones ("Pride And Fall", "Cradlesong"); when the latter take over, the compositions instead plunge explicitly into refined ambient depths, now placidly modulated ("Here In the North"), now tending toward dark, evocative mists ("Egdon Heath"), whose final outcome is perfectly captured by the closing "The Rattle In Our Throats", which clearly sits along that subtle thread connecting the cosmic visions of Labradford to the masterful orchestrations of Eluvium.

A thoroughly respectable debut and a pleasant new discovery within the boundless ambient constellation that, while starting from well-established cornerstones, keeps reshaping a plurality of only partially homogeneous elements through a melancholic sensibility that is anything but lacking in touching pathos.

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07/07/2009