British musician and producer Kevin Richard Martin (also known for his work under The Bug moniker) has released a new album called White Light. He confesses he has “always had a love/hate relationshipwith the saxophone.”. “After you hear Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler or Peter Brotzmann even, you just question any possibility of finding a fresh sound or approach, due to the instant connotations the sound has..”
According to the press release, Having given up professionally playing the instrument since ‘Curse of the Golden Vampire’s ‘Mass Destruction’ in 2003, he may have temporarily lost the will to blow the horn, but he hadnt lost the long term aim to “reduce its sound to pure gulf stream air” by other means. So for both ‘White Light’ and ‘Red Light’, Kevin decided to resample his old sax recordings, and additionally explore various sound libraries/vst instruments as the departure point, to see just how heavily the instrument could be chopped, screwed, stretched and dubbed in his lab, to try and locate his “own sound”. Martin informs me enthusiastically, “there were no other sounds or sources utilised on these albums, other than saxophone or additionally, specifically synthetic sax, filtered through layer upon layer, wave upon wave of fx.”
‘White Light’ contains the long form results of these deconstruction sessions. The prolonged “meltdown cycles”, spectral solos and hypnotically evolving loops sound as eerie as they do beautiful, as the liquid brass is set adrift in the studio’s magical domain. The indelible inspiration of Techno Animal’s ‘Dream Forger’ from 1991, side 2 of Bowie/Eno’s ‘Low’ and years of “getting truly lost in dub” evidently results here in some of the most captivating music he has ever produced. Opener, ”Into Air’ resembles Burial remixing ‘DIsintegration Loops’ with a solo to die for, whilst ‘Float away’ echoes the Arkestra recorded underwater at 11rpm. Elsewhere liquid drone and classical drift converge to form radiant rivers of fluid, blissed out brass. If the King Midas Sound’s collab with Fennesz for ‘Edition 1′(Ninja Tune) was Kevin’s ambient starting point, this album has reached the next stunning level of dreamy evolution.
Check the full streaming below.
‘Red Light’ is the shadowy companion album to ‘White Light’. More melancholic and arguably slower still, it contains shorter form compositions, and a moodier veneer… For anyone who was bewitched by The Bug’s previous collaboration with Earth for ‘Concrete Desert’, this could well hit the mark, as a resonantly foggy follow up to that L.A. inspired sprawling opus.
Film noir-jazz drugged down to a snail’s pace, is duly dusted with Martin’s signature atmospheric dub pressure, as the spirit of David Lynch and the ghosts of broken lives are invoked for ‘Gone’, Whilst it could be Art Ensemble of Chicago emulating Sunn 0)))’s slow jams, on the crawl out, end piece, for the aptly titled, ‘Oblivion Seeker’….
A soundtrack to long nights in concrete jungles, the celluloid vision of ‘Red Light’ is sharp as a blade. Anyone who digs the idea of hearing sax players float into the heavens, and jazz pulsations emerging from the titanic, are in for a treat…