Well, it’s now that time of year where the leaves are starting to turn to earthy colours and start falling off the trees — at least here in Scotland at the moment — as we begin that long gradual slide into winter. It’s happened enough in my life now, these changes of seasons, that I shift my activities to adapt to each season as it comes. It gets dark earlier and I start hunkering down for some creative projects for the winter and perhaps picking up more books to read and doing some listening while doing so.
As it happens, probably any underlying stats of what I’m actually playing in terms of records would show that the majority of music I listen to is more in the realm of ambient, experimental and cinematic music (soundtracks) — or anything generally in a “low key” zone. I tend to listen to some deep drones when going to sleep and a lot of times will listen to music that doesn’t jump up and down and totally demand all of my attention when I pick something to play that serves to augment the sonic and physical environment rather than override it.
“Between The Spaces I” is a track that gets played often enough — it being of off the sole LP titled Now Wait Until Last Year by experimental musician Caroline K (Caroline Kaye Walters), released in 1987. K, who passed away in 2008 due to leukemia, was one of the founding members of the London-based experimental/industrial collective called Nocturnal Emissions, that started releasing material at the beginning of the 1980s and sort of continued on ever since with a somewhat impressive back catalogue, a lot of which can be found on their BandCamp.
There’s something about this track that reminds me of wandering around in some somewhat barren landscape on a crisp winter’s day. It has an almost has a solemn, Gregorian quality about it with subtle shifts in phrasing and chord progressions that each shift sort of changes the audio “colour” of the track somewhat, composed on what sounds like a minimal guitar line, and what I can only perceive as being very organic synthesizer string and bell sounds shrouded in reverb heavy dissonance. Perhaps there’s an oboe and real strings in there but I can’t really tell.
This track is drawn out and lush, and perhaps crosses similar ground so some of the more ethereal output in the early days of 4AD, most notably the first This Mortal Coil album It’ll End In Tears, on which the sublime and stunning “Waves Become Wings” gets a lot of play around these parts and it’s gorgeous metitative drone highlighted by the ghostly voice of Lisa Gerrard blending in with the lush ambience.