The hidden past of Fovea Hex vocalist and focal point Clodagh Simonds
is almost as colourful as her present on this beguilingly mysterious
album of new songs supported by an ensemble – neither the words 'band'
nor 'group' lend the project the gravitas it requires - made up of
left-field luminaries including Brian Eno, Nurse With Wound's Colin
Potter and Human Greed's Michael Begg (the latter two of whom were
responsible for the Fragile Pitches sonic installation at Edinburgh's
St Giles Cathedral during the city's Hogmanay 2009/10` arts programme).
Live too, Ms Simonds and co are well-connected, having performed in
Paris at the behest of film director David Lynch for the opening of his
retrospective exhibition in the gardens of the Cartier Foundation.
This is a long way from Simonds' teenage origins as one third of the
vocal frontline of Dublin-based folksters Mellow Candle, which she
formed with friends at convent school in the late 1960s. In the early
1970s Simonds would appear as a backing vocalist on Thin Lizzy's second
album, as well as Mike Oldfield's post Tubular Bells prog-crossover
projects, Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn before decamping to New York. Here
she worked with film composer Carter Burwell and radical theatre troupe
LaMama before effectively dropping off the musical radar.
Simonds' early work has been covered by All About Eve and Pavement's
Stephen Malkmus, while she popped into view in 1999 to sing a Syd
Barrett/James Joyce number, Golden Hair on Eno collaborator Russell
Mills' Pearl & Umbra album. Between 2005 and 2007 with Fovea Hex
Simonds released a trilogy of EPs. Collectively, Bloom, Huge and Allure
were put under the umbrella title of Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent.
That's the context, then, for this elegant and melancholy collection
that mixes strings with electronics to underscore Simonds' remarkable
piano-led songs of innocence and experience,
dominated by a voice that's too steely to be deigned ethereal, but
remains too other-worldly to file alongside more common-or-garden
female singer-songwriters. The impression on the opening Far From Here
through to the finale of Still Unseen is of little baroque sketches
that have blown in from Bloomsbury in some sacred mix of world-weary
preciousness. The pace is languid, the arrangements intricate and
fragile, the reference points opaque and incantatory, with Brian Eno's
co-opted bells coursing through Falling Things (Where Does A Girl
Begin?) on which Laura Sheeran takes waif-like lead vocal inbetween
playing musical saw. All of which conspires to leave the listener
deliciously, deliriously giddy.
If you're looking for contemporary fellow travellers, Foeva Hex's
nearest ancestor is probably This Mortal Coil, the 4AD Records
'supergroup', who between 1984 and 1991 released a trilogy of
compendiums that featured interpretations of neglected works by the
likes of Tim Buckley, Chris Bell, Syd Barrett and other cult
singer/songwriters from the 1960s and 1970s (Buckley's Song To The
Siren, as shimmeringly interpreted by Cocteau Twins Elizabeth Fraser
and Robin Guthrie, was This Mortal Coil's breakout hit). The This
Mortal Coil records featured a myriad of female voices, underscored
largely by dark, electronic treatments and arrangements. The
neo-mediaevalisms of Dead Can Dance, whose members also appeared on the
This Mortal Coil records, are also fellow travellers with Simmonds and
co, as are the deep vocal stylings of PuMaJaW's Pinkie McClure.
Rewinding back to 1975, one could claim kin between Simonds and the
singers on Voices and Instruments, an album of works by composers Jan
Steele and John Cage released on Brian Eno's short-lived Obscure
Records label. Consisting largely of settings of poems by James Joyce
and EE Cummings, Voices and Instruments is a low-key chamber record
featuring the likes of improv veterans Steve Beresford and Fred Frith,
and playfully dubbed by some as quiet-garde. The intonations of Janet
Sherbourne on Steele's All Day, with lyrics by Joyce, Wyatt's
interpretation of Cage's setting of another Joyce lyric, The Wonderful
Widow of Eighteen Springs as well as Cummings' Experiences No 2, and
especially Bley's take on Cage and Cummings' Forever and Sunsmell are
all awash with familiar sounding intonations that seem to have trickled
all the way down to Here Is Where We Used To Sing.
In truth, however, the roots of Simonds' piano-led material dates far
further back, and in execution and arrangement is closer to a
slowly-burning twenty-first century melding of mediaeval motets and
nineteenth century Lieder or art song cycles a la Schubert or Mahler.
Such out and out naked material has duly been both fleshed out and
protected by the mix of electronic and acoustic sounds from instruments
ranging from state-of-art to ancient and arcane, and which take things
even further into the ether to create a honey-dewed dreamscape that
nevertheless retains its strength of character and focus to create one
of the most hauntingly lovely discoveries of this or any other century
thus far.
For those quick of the mark, Three Beams is a limited edition
three-track accompaniment of extended remixes and reinterpretations by
Potter, Begg and William Basinki, who serve up a sepulchrally-inclined
trilogy of glow-in-the-dark ambient soundscapes. With the second
punctuated by multi-tracked voices overlaying the slow-burning
melodrama, the effect is as other-worldly as the dissonant chorale
unleashed on the Les Mysteres Voix des Bulgares series of records
released, again on 4AD, in the late 1980s. As with its mother album,
this bonus disc can't help but leave you nape-hair rigid as you
languish in all its ornate finery.
The List, May 2011
ends
is almost as colourful as her present on this beguilingly mysterious
album of new songs supported by an ensemble – neither the words 'band'
nor 'group' lend the project the gravitas it requires - made up of
left-field luminaries including Brian Eno, Nurse With Wound's Colin
Potter and Human Greed's Michael Begg (the latter two of whom were
responsible for the Fragile Pitches sonic installation at Edinburgh's
St Giles Cathedral during the city's Hogmanay 2009/10` arts programme).
Live too, Ms Simonds and co are well-connected, having performed in
Paris at the behest of film director David Lynch for the opening of his
retrospective exhibition in the gardens of the Cartier Foundation.
This is a long way from Simonds' teenage origins as one third of the
vocal frontline of Dublin-based folksters Mellow Candle, which she
formed with friends at convent school in the late 1960s. In the early
1970s Simonds would appear as a backing vocalist on Thin Lizzy's second
album, as well as Mike Oldfield's post Tubular Bells prog-crossover
projects, Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn before decamping to New York. Here
she worked with film composer Carter Burwell and radical theatre troupe
LaMama before effectively dropping off the musical radar.
Simonds' early work has been covered by All About Eve and Pavement's
Stephen Malkmus, while she popped into view in 1999 to sing a Syd
Barrett/James Joyce number, Golden Hair on Eno collaborator Russell
Mills' Pearl & Umbra album. Between 2005 and 2007 with Fovea Hex
Simonds released a trilogy of EPs. Collectively, Bloom, Huge and Allure
were put under the umbrella title of Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent.
That's the context, then, for this elegant and melancholy collection
that mixes strings with electronics to underscore Simonds' remarkable
piano-led songs of innocence and experience,
dominated by a voice that's too steely to be deigned ethereal, but
remains too other-worldly to file alongside more common-or-garden
female singer-songwriters. The impression on the opening Far From Here
through to the finale of Still Unseen is of little baroque sketches
that have blown in from Bloomsbury in some sacred mix of world-weary
preciousness. The pace is languid, the arrangements intricate and
fragile, the reference points opaque and incantatory, with Brian Eno's
co-opted bells coursing through Falling Things (Where Does A Girl
Begin?) on which Laura Sheeran takes waif-like lead vocal inbetween
playing musical saw. All of which conspires to leave the listener
deliciously, deliriously giddy.
If you're looking for contemporary fellow travellers, Foeva Hex's
nearest ancestor is probably This Mortal Coil, the 4AD Records
'supergroup', who between 1984 and 1991 released a trilogy of
compendiums that featured interpretations of neglected works by the
likes of Tim Buckley, Chris Bell, Syd Barrett and other cult
singer/songwriters from the 1960s and 1970s (Buckley's Song To The
Siren, as shimmeringly interpreted by Cocteau Twins Elizabeth Fraser
and Robin Guthrie, was This Mortal Coil's breakout hit). The This
Mortal Coil records featured a myriad of female voices, underscored
largely by dark, electronic treatments and arrangements. The
neo-mediaevalisms of Dead Can Dance, whose members also appeared on the
This Mortal Coil records, are also fellow travellers with Simmonds and
co, as are the deep vocal stylings of PuMaJaW's Pinkie McClure.
Rewinding back to 1975, one could claim kin between Simonds and the
singers on Voices and Instruments, an album of works by composers Jan
Steele and John Cage released on Brian Eno's short-lived Obscure
Records label. Consisting largely of settings of poems by James Joyce
and EE Cummings, Voices and Instruments is a low-key chamber record
featuring the likes of improv veterans Steve Beresford and Fred Frith,
and playfully dubbed by some as quiet-garde. The intonations of Janet
Sherbourne on Steele's All Day, with lyrics by Joyce, Wyatt's
interpretation of Cage's setting of another Joyce lyric, The Wonderful
Widow of Eighteen Springs as well as Cummings' Experiences No 2, and
especially Bley's take on Cage and Cummings' Forever and Sunsmell are
all awash with familiar sounding intonations that seem to have trickled
all the way down to Here Is Where We Used To Sing.
In truth, however, the roots of Simonds' piano-led material dates far
further back, and in execution and arrangement is closer to a
slowly-burning twenty-first century melding of mediaeval motets and
nineteenth century Lieder or art song cycles a la Schubert or Mahler.
Such out and out naked material has duly been both fleshed out and
protected by the mix of electronic and acoustic sounds from instruments
ranging from state-of-art to ancient and arcane, and which take things
even further into the ether to create a honey-dewed dreamscape that
nevertheless retains its strength of character and focus to create one
of the most hauntingly lovely discoveries of this or any other century
thus far.
For those quick of the mark, Three Beams is a limited edition
three-track accompaniment of extended remixes and reinterpretations by
Potter, Begg and William Basinki, who serve up a sepulchrally-inclined
trilogy of glow-in-the-dark ambient soundscapes. With the second
punctuated by multi-tracked voices overlaying the slow-burning
melodrama, the effect is as other-worldly as the dissonant chorale
unleashed on the Les Mysteres Voix des Bulgares series of records
released, again on 4AD, in the late 1980s. As with its mother album,
this bonus disc can't help but leave you nape-hair rigid as you
languish in all its ornate finery.
The List, May 2011
ends
Comments