CLEM LEEK - Holly Lane

The chimes of a vintage grandfather clock mark the full-length debut of Clem Leek, a young English composer who already made a name for himself last year among the most interesting figures of that now crowded scene balanced between sound sculpture, drone music and post-classical leanings.

From three EPs released within a few months ("Through The Annular", "Snow Tales" and the collaboration with Jannick Schou, "Pimlico") to a cohesive album is a short step, but a not insignificant one for an artist committed to exploring desolate emotional terrain first-hand, while also championing other musicians' work through his excellent label, Schedios.

If his earlier, concise works revolved mainly around graceful melodic structures traced on the piano, on "Holly Lane" Leek firmly focuses on field recordings, strings and enveloping drone.

The result is a work of rather sombre tones, achieved through the elongation of notes that resonate now in even swells, now punctuated by rhythmic tremors, samples and distant voices, sketching an alien spatio-temporal dimension.

The amniotic embrace of "Holly Lane" is from the outset a welcoming flow, in which slender electronic fragments ripple across a melodic carpet of strings bowed with restrained sensitivity: "Mystery Moor" is thus already the perfect calling card for a work that combines extreme expressive rigour with cinematic impressions and assured emotional openings.

Leaving the piano's suggestions behind, the English musician has set out to walk the thin line that separates austere (dark-)ambient scores from dreamy nuances capable of stirring hearts through soft harmonies and timbres. Although the work is conceptually dedicated to places that belong to his memory, Leek avoids any easy concession to romanticism, nonetheless making the many compositions in which drones take over sinuous and alluring. Indeed, it is precisely the electronic filtering that impresses for its refinement and harmonic development in pieces such as the title track and "Mistletoe Lane", which dissolve the darkness of the work's opening into luminous, insubstantial atmospheres, somewhere between Hammock and Stars Of The Lid.

Ghosts, however, soon take shape again in the form of claustrophobic vocalisations, reverberations and prolonged delay, which drive guitar effects ("Cliff Castle") and scattered piano notes ("Greylings Manor") into a circular motion dripping with dark charm.

The synthesis of such a dense and cohesive work is encapsulated in the evocative closing track, which flawlessly balances the classical sensibility evident in the early EPs with the broader compositional spectrum of today. It is precisely at the intersection of an estranging cello drone and the crystalline violin tears of "The Burnt Home" that it reaches a misty, heartfelt solemnity, suspended between anguish and hope and somewhat comparable to that poured out by Richard Skelton on "Landings". And, much like that album, "Holly Lane" thrives on a vibrant and spontaneous intensity, concentrated in just over forty minutes of music that rests on pure instinct, free of any affectation, a striking confirmation of the considerable potential of an artist whose name is worth keeping an eye on among the many contemporary ambient-classical interpreters.

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06/09/2010