Ben Chatwin's music speaks loudly of solitude. He lives and records on the coast of the Firth of Forth, just outside Edinburgh – not exactly the most isolated of spots, but it's not hard to hear in his waves of texture and simple repeated motifs the endless grey presence of the North Sea rolling out into the distance.
This is Chatwin's second album under his own name, but his ninth if you include the albums he made as Talvihorros on a number of labels, and it is much the same that he's always done: bowed strings that shimmer and pizzicato ones that echo, grainy guitar textures rising up in waves and sprays, abstracted and distorted rumbles and thrums, and melody – if it is present – always limited to the very simplest of four or five note steps up and down a scale or arpeggio.
It's peculiar music that, like a grey seascape, is never the same twice
But within this simplicity is variation and immense depth. It certainly feels like there has been a maturing of his sound: on this album there is a certainty to those melodies, an increased sense of dramatic structure within tracks whether its through three minutes of subtle washes in “Oscillations”, or seven minutes of contrapunctal high drama in “The Kraken”.
Often, thanks to parts like the fuzzed-out synth ripples of “Standing Waves” or the patient cimbalom of “Phantom Lights” we're transported into a zone of distant memories of cold war thrillers. It's peculiar music that, like a grey seascape, is never the same twice: depending on your mood, sometimes bleak can just mean bleak, but at others fine details reveal themselves, what was monochrome becomes full of pointillist colour, and the seemingly blank spaces can become sublime signifiers of size.
Watch the video for "The Euclidian Plane":
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