Finglebone – 23

 

This lad’s work is really, really great.

 

This lad’s work is really, really great.

 

http://finglebone.bandcamp.com/album/23

A lovely LP and one you should pay some serious attention to. A selection of field recordings (David Byrne would call them “found sounds” or something) and guitar runs this exemplifies the British pastoral spirit – and by that I mean the wild music made by the String Band or James Blackstone or Bert Jansch – at its zenith. This is also a deceptive listen as there are a great deal of nuances and sonic byways, thrown up in the atmospheric fuzz and gloop of the field recordings.

Many of the street or field noises add a rich counter-point to the guitar runs. And because they are in essence random recordings, they act with a freedom and spontaneity that you couldn’t get if you arranged them “cold” in a studio. Befuddled, Lucid and Floggiston are a bucolic reflections mirrored through a crystalline prism. Other tracks (Bridport to Westbay, or Flouse Hole) somehow remind me of an ambient take on Robyn Hitchcock’s I Often Dream of Trains, or (weirdly) the chamber music element in Witthusser & Westrupp’s psych-folk muse. Elsewhere, pulses such as The Picture Became Alive and Twenty Three are reminiscent of musique concrète. It’s all stuff that peers through a glass, darkly.

This lad’s work is really, really great.