Paddy McAloon: I Trawl The Megahertz - Nils Frahm: Felt - Autumn Chorus: The Village to the Vale

I fell into the ambient trap again. Well sort of. And not that I'm particularly minding. How did it happen? A few weeks ago, after having listened to Prefab Sprout's Let's Change The World With Music, I ordered Paddy McAloon's I Trawl The Megahertz. It took ages to get here and I'd forgotten about it when it came in the mail. What a surprise when I dropped it into the CD player. The album starts with a 22 minute long extemporisation. Female voice over a minimalist chamber music accompaniment (soloists of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, apparently). A long, dreamlike story. A sequence of poetic vignettes from a life. It fits and doesn't fit together as dreams are wont to do. And then the story behind it. Somewhere in the late 1990s McAloon was diagnosed with a medical disorder that (temporarily) impaired his vision. Pretty much immobilised he resorted to listening to radio shows. He started recording them, picking up isolated phrases or even words, splicing them, weaving them into the backbone of a narrative, which he proceeded polish and pad. Then he started to set the words to music. And so, by trawling the ether, the album was born. The long title track - narrated by mysterious Yvonne Connors - is followed by eight other, shorter tracks, most of them instrumental, some with voice. Paddy himself is only heard on the beautiful ballad Sleeping Rough. I need some more time to make up my mind about this weird album. The sophistication of the recording and the overall mood reminds me somewhat of Pat Metheny's Secret Story, although the music is at first sight very different. But just as the latter I Trawl seems to sway between enchantment and kitsch. An Amazon reviewer says you need to hear I Trawl The Megahertz at least a hundred times in order to get to the bottom of it. I'm certainly willing to give Paddy McAloon the benefit of the doubt. So I'll be returning to this album soon.


Ever since I got to know Nils Frahm's Wintermusik and The Bells, I'm holding this young German composer, pianist and improviser in high esteem. Again, we're in the shadowy realm of high art and bathos but Frahm seems to have an uncanny feeling for staying on the right side of the fence (which colleagues such as Dustin O'Halloran and Max Richter are not always able to). I'm always deeply touched by his music. This little video, in all its simplicity, I haven't quite been able to forget. Next week, Frahm is coming to Leuven, again, and I was happy to get one of the last available tickets. I hadn't listened to Frahm's latest album, Felt, and I have been trawling YouTube to get an idea of what this has to offer. I haven't been able to dig up all the tracks, but what I've heard did please me and provided me with solace whilst I was pulling together this big, complicated, unwieldy report during late night shifts this week. Felt is a very intimate affair, oozing a velvety nocturnal atmosphere that keeps you wrapped nice and warm in your aural cocoon. Allegedly the album came into being quite serendipitously. Frahm was looking for ways to play his piano very late at night when he had the idea to dampen the strings with a piece of ... felt: "Originally I wanted to do my neighbours a favour by damping the sound... If I want to play piano during the quiet of the night, the only respectful way is by layering thick felt in front of the strings and using very gentle fingers." The music was recorded by putting the mikes as closely as possibly to the hammers of the piano, with Frahm playing the instrument pianissimo with the most delicate touch. The result is a whirring, microscopic, intimate soundscape from which the piano sound emerges in a dreamlike fashion. Some tracks feature other instruments too, such as tintinnabuli, synths or tapes. The atmosphere is beautifully caught. The 8-minute final track, More, is for the time being my favourite. The rhythmic buoyancy of its first section connects to Wintermusik, but the improvisatory passage that follows upon it transports me back to the more elated Bells. There is a fine coda which reminds me of the music we used - what is it: three years ago? - to accompany our final slide show in the masterclass with Lorenzo Castore. Truly memorable, that experience. I look forward to listening to the full album very soon. And I hope the live performance will not disappoint me.

Listening to Nils Frahm's Felt I started to look up some other ambient-feel music. I hit upon the beautiful YouTube channel of untitledesigner: a feast for the ears and the eyes! Another find was Benjamin Vis' now defunct blog Nieuwe Geluiden. The first tip I picked up from BV was a hit: Autumn Chorus' The Village to the Vale. The album is a first and is only available for download from Bandcamp. This band of 4 Brightonians produces an expansive, richly layered and mellow sound that strikes me as a slightly friendlier version of Sigur Ros. It's post-rock that is drenched in nostalgia and an intimation of transitoriness. A British lineage that goes back to Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues is very much in evidence as well. I would have sworn that Marcus Mumford, from the folkrock band Mumford and Sons, was taking the lead vocals, but it's not the case. The resemblance between the voices is uncanny, though. I ran through the album a couple of times and fell particularly for the wonderful finale, consisting of the 16 minute track Rosa and the final Bye Bye Now. The long stretch is impeccably paced, lending it an almost symphonic feel and taking the listener on a tantalising journey that feels like reading a Murakami novel in one go. Amazing what these guys pulled off in their first album. This is a definite keeper. Thanks, BV.