DAKOTA SUITE - The Night Just Keeps Coming In

Sharing one's own isolation with others is a decidedly arduous task. Yet this is precisely the mission Chris Hooson sets for “The Night Just Keeps Coming In”, not simply a remix album but a genuine reinterpretation of the material from his latest work, the deeply personal and inscrutable “The End Of Trying”. Produced in a run of just three hundred copies, “The Night Just Keeps Coming In” inaugurates the catalogue of Hooson's new label, Navigators Yard, which will be devoted exclusively to the release of instrumental work.

If the recent Dakota Suite album could rightly be considered a hymn to incommunicability for piano and cello, “The Night Just Keeps Coming In” seems to take things a step further, toward a kind of musical ground zero, in which the skeletal structures of the tracks are subjected to processes of addition or subtraction at the hands of a wide array of artists, bringing together many of the finest names currently active across a broad musical spectrum spanning classical heritage, electroacoustic miniatures, and the countless shades of the inexhaustible ambient microcosm. The purpose of these reworkings is, depending on the case, either to build more elaborate pieces - including in terms of the instrumentation used - or to dissolve notes and harmonies into uniform ambient layers. The tracks from "The End Of Trying" serve, in fact, merely as the starting point from which the artists involved in the project develop compositions that can almost be considered entirely their own. In some cases the reworkings stay very faithful to the originals, but more often they show substantial differences, bent to the character of whoever created them.

Among the various reworkings, particular credit goes to those that manage, even while embracing minimalism, to bring out the value of the original composition: “This Failing Sea”, which in Peter Broderick's version is enriched with field recordings and an impetuous cello, and “A Quietly Gathering Tragedy”, to which Hauschka adds brightness and verve through the use of electronics and a music box. The German duo Swod operate along similar lines, layering vinyl effects and dense webs of field recordings onto the melancholy, desolate strings of “Een Langzaam Lekkende Wond”, while Finland's Hannu transforms the fragment “The End Of Trying Part III” into a composition with a strongly personal stamp, through the generous use of xylophones with a boreal flavour and warm organic instrumentation.

And it is above all this ability to make Hooson's reinterpreted pieces their own that makes the project interesting and, at times, essential listening: just consider the dark interpretation by Elegi, which makes the already desolate “All The Love I Had Was Not Enough” sound even more austere and despairing, or Deaf Center's remix, which, pitting the string melodies against each other in an almost brutal way, turns “Very Early One Morning On Old Road” into a track that would not have looked at all out of place on their debut “Pale Ravine”, that small masterpiece of unsettling ambient subtlety. Arve Henriksen does even better - a past collaborator of David Sylvian and a member of Supersilent - reshaping and elevating “The End Of Trying Part I” with his unmistakable trumpet and an exquisitely refined arrangement.

An intense body of work, and a successful undertaking overall: the rather ambitious project carried out by Chris Hooson with “The Night Just Keeps Coming In” not only gives genre enthusiasts sixteen thoroughly respectable tracks (albeit with the inevitable unevenness in quality typical of such projects), but also broadens, even more than “The End Of Trying” did, the musical horizons of his Dakota Suite, offering listeners a richly varied picture of the current state of what, through increasingly bold rhetorical and lexical contortions, people have taken to calling - not without some reservations - contemporary classical.

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16/05/2009