For all its sprawl of sparse landscape and sweeping skyline, it’s not so much grand gestures or big themes these peaks inspire Newman to. Rather, beneath them, he finds smaller hermetic spaces, though occasional expansive shifts in between make for a satisfying variation in dynamic.
Over the course of a decade or so Autistici has quietly accrued a series of accomplished releases across a range of bespoke labels – from 12k to Home Normal to Keshhhh, not forgetting his own Audiobulb. On a break from the ‘bulb, the artist known to his Mum as David Newman hikes over to nearby Hebden Bridge cottage industry, Hibernate (3view here), via which he delivers Beneath Peaks, an interpretive audio document of a walking-camping tour. The Sheffield recordist captured sounds from the ground around the eponymous Peak District, mixing them with piano, guitar, and synth, with further tweakings from the Audiobulb-approved Ambient software module (designed by Christopher Hipgrave, featured, notably, on his Low Point album).
For all its sprawl of sparse landscape and sweeping skyline, it’s not so much grand gestures or big themes these peaks inspire Newman to. Rather, beneath them, he finds smaller hermetic spaces, though occasional expansive shifts in between make for a satisfying variation in dynamic. His research interests in inner-outer land-sound inter-scape, emblematized in cover art, are pursued through melodic motifs nested inside field sounds, here discreetly treated, there left to their own devices. “Asleep Beneath Nests (Fieldhead)” first locates us in slumber-bound sunrise with a montage of nature tones—animal and human. The Autistici touch is evident in their rhythmic harnessing, as what might have remained mere field flutter is transformatively tweaked. A cornucopia of stylings and soundings follows in a clutch of cameos and varied vignettes, from the ambient wash of “Styx” to “Aidale,” meandering piano echoing Eno’s Airports, drifting into altered dream-states and transitions to faraway traffic passing by. The echoing delight of “Padley Gorge” evokes skies above and rocky terrain beneath, while “Edall” hosts breathy streams and swells. “Noe (Upper Booth)” brings repose before more dynamic dronescapes, “Mulgrave’s Dining Room” and “Edge Over Millstone View,” the latter with textural turbo from Erik Schoster’s guitar. Fellow feeling is found between shifting stillness and jarring motion on “Mam Tor Soarers’ Workshop.” Journey’s end comes with “Sleep State For Carl Wark,” as sleep returns to the strains of music box and strings.
Beneath Peaks, then, finds Autistici homing in on a sweet spot between a kind of updated musique concrète and more musically concrete expression. No join-the-dots field-recording drone-by-numbers peddler he, but a hands-dirty delver into the audio mulch, forging electro-acoustic pieces of contemplative charm marked with dissonant turns and an antic spirit. Newman’s luminous treatments musicize sheltered sites, ancient paths, and rugged rocks alike in a set of pen-portraits both affectingly familiar and appealingly unheimlich.
Beneath Peaks is available on Hibernate [Release page | Bandcamp]
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