Skip to main content

Sound of Yell – Light the Currents (Infinite Greyscale)

Music and art are hardly strange bed-fellows, and indeed the liaison has been an ever-fertile breeding ground for cross-artform collaborations. As releasing records has become a more bespoke affair, editionising what’s effectively several works of art in one has made for creations of rare beauty. So it goes with the Glasgow/Berlin-based Infinite Greyscale label. This new release ticks all the above boxes as part of their exquisitely realised 10” singles club, which has previously hosted work by German electronic duo Mouse on Mars and composer Holly Herndon.

This latest opus from Glasgow's Sound of Yell compounds and emboldens the label's aesthetic at every level. Released in a numbered edition of 300 on single sided aqua-blue vinyl with a screen-printed B-side visualised by Ulrich Schmidt-Novak, and with handmade artwork by label bosses/ curators Paul McDevitt and Cornelius Quabeck.

Sound of Yell is the chameleon-like project of Stevie Jones, whose peripatetic musical adventure began in the 1990s with recently reignited post-rock instrumentalists El Hombre Trajeado, before playing with the likes of Arab Strap and Alasdair Roberts. As Sound of Yell, Jones' ever-expanding ensemble has at various points included former Nalle viola player Aby Vulliamy and vocalist and electronicist Kim Moore, aka WOLF. Jones joins the musical dots with this low-key musical community as and when required.

Following the full length Brocken Spectre in 2014 and the Fortunate Fume single the year after, both on Chemikal Underground, a second collection remains pending. This two-part composition is a fully rounded entity in its own right.

Part 1 of Light the Currents was written for a performance at Dundee Contemporary Arts in October 2016 as part of an event to coincide with the major exhibition of work by the late Katy Dove. For the occasion, Jones enlisted flautist Georgie McGeown, Trembling Bells drummer Alex Neilson and vocalist, artist and fellow member with Dove of Muscles of Joy, Vikki Morton.

The result is a bright and jaunty affair, which buzzes in as Jones' busy picked guitar lays down its rhythmic steps that are driven by Neilson, over which McGeown's flute melodies waft in and out. Morton's vocal, augmented by McGeown's harmonies, serves up a pastoral meditation which, all wrapped up in pitter-patting skitters, blossoms into a creation cluttered with an intense sense of life which off-sets the circumstances surrounding its origin.

There's nothing whimsical at play here. A muscularity is at the heart of the song's concentrated insularity, giving it confidence to burst into the open and flower into a fleet-footed dancing bird. At the end, the little flourish that finishes the song seems to take a bow.

Part 2 was written in immediate response to both the exhibition and the experience of playing at it. Wordless, it sounds more reflective, instruments tip-toe around each other, circling woozily until flute, recorder and guitar find common ground on a record produced and presented with every ounce of love it deserves.

www.infinitegreyscale.com
www.soundofyell.co.uk

 
Product, July 2017

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h