Drone Records
Your cart (0 item)

MARSFIELD - The Towering Sky

Format: CD
Label & Cat.Number: Faraway Press FP16
Release Year: 2010
Note: project of ANDREW CHALK, BRENDAN WALLS, ROBIN BARNES, VIKKI JACKMAN, with recordings from May 2005; comes in the typical heavy cardboard mini-LP gatefold sleeve with obi-strip, very handmade & beautiful
Price (incl. 19% VAT): €15.00
Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock!


More Info

"This record - a project involving Andrew Chalk, Vikki Jackman, Brendan Walls and Robin Barnes – features music recorded in 2005, slightly different from what a superficial listener could expect from this label which traditionally releases works trademarked by temperate nebulosity. Still, if one’s ears are open as required, lots of familiar factors that establish the belonging of The Towering Sky in the same area of sonic investigation are unearthed.
The album is divided in two tracks, a total of circa 37 minutes. The first – “Marsfield Cathedral” – is a wonderful improvisation whose reverberant qualities possess an innate influence that furnishes a suitable environment with a soul of its own. The predominant timbres seem to derive from bowed metals – glass, too? - and resonating bowls, yet I wouldn’t be surprised if processed strings (guitar and piano’s lowest regions, perhaps) had been put in the recipe somewhere. The immediate reaction deceivingly sets us in “expected comparison” mode: one immediately thinks Organum and Mirror, since the room’s corners help those incredibly booming frequencies to morph, ricochet and affirm as it happens with those marvelous entities. There’s a section in which you may be tempted to bet some money on the existence of voices: ghostly undulations, almost disquieting if you will, that make their presence heard for a while and then just disappear. It might be a trick of the mind, though. Better remaining with an attractive doubt, sometimes.
As dramatic as the previous episode is, the group's unique personality is established by “Marsfield Common”, which is centered around a tentative exploration of a large ambience through the use of regular instruments; we guess a harmonium or an accordion (both?) are in there, and maybe a plucked cello, or a viola. What gives the piece strength is not the affirmation of those sparse pitches and stabs amidst a blur of indeterminate details, but that very intangible background going on continuously. Possibly they are tapes reproducing remixed snippets of priorly emitted sounds, or treated field recordings. Whatever it is, this creates a bed for the stream to flow, so to speak. And flow the river does with occasional surges, repeated bumps and, in general, a certain degree of irregularity that, curiously, push the sound towards lands that are usually inhabited by Chalk’s former partner in Ora, Darren Tate. Fairly inexplicable and engrossing, including the splendid conclusion: decreasing intensity and progressive instrumental rarefaction, accompanied by thunder and rain. And, once again, we feel deeply grateful at the end of the experience, not the least for the stunning poetry of the cover artwork: the photo of an ancient bucolic setting with children and sheep that literally defies description." [Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes]

www.farawaypress.eu


"Marsfield is a project featuring the premier UK drone artist
Andrew Chalk along side Vikki Jackman, Robin Barnes, and Brendan
Walls. This collective recorded The Towering Sky back in 2005, only to
see if released some five years later. Given the gap in recording to
release, we have to wonder what else Mr. Chalk has buried in the
vaults of his Faraway Press that one day might see the light of day.
The recordings reflect the strategies of David Jackman, who had
employed the talents of a much younger Andrew Chalk many many moons
ago in his Organum ensemble. The Marsfield participants have all
gathered various pieces of resonant metal (maybe a large piece of
sheet metal, maybe a long stringed instrument, probably a gong or two,
and definitely a singing bowl or four) and extracted sustained
textures, prolonged scrapes, deep bellowings, and elegantly warbled
tones in a large reverberant room. With all of the room noise with its
spectral echoing, damp reflections, and incidental ambience, the
Marsfield sessions sound as if they could have been recorded in some
abandoned factory somewhere in the Northeast of England. The first
Isolde record that Chalk and Barnes had constructed a few years back
is not all that dissimilar to The Towering Sky, with the first half of
this record appearing as shape-shiting ghosts of corroded, droning
haze, and shifting into the latter half of the record pocked with
distant plucks and small hand bells that dissolve into field
recordings of English rain showers. As with all of the Faraway Press
titles, this is beautifully packaged; and as with all Andrew Chalk
releases, this is very highly recommended." [Aquarius Records]