Digitonal :: Set The Weather Fair (Just Music)

Contemplative, finely wrought, and serene, Digitonal thread the optimistic, irrepressible spirit of MacNeice’s Fanfare for the Makers through the entire fabric of the album.

Ambient electronics meets modern classical

In the poem Fanfare for the Makers, from which the title of Digitonal’s latest album is drawn, Louis MacNeice writes:

So fanfare for the Makers: who compose
A book of words or deeds who runs may write
As many who do run, as a family grows

At times like sunflowers turning towards the light.

Louis MacNeice “Fanfare for the Makers”

Here, MacNeice honors the act of creation, even of things not commonly considered creative endeavours: planting trees, raising a child, making a joke. It’s all worthy of fanfare, of celebration, because these are the things which “lend the passing moment its words and wings.” It’s easy to see why Digitonal’s Andrew Dobson and his collaborator Dom Graveson felt a connection to MacNeice: the creative energy they’ve poured into Set the Weather Fair represents the culmination of decades of devotion to the art and craft of musicianship.

The nine tracks here sit comfortably at the intersection of ambient electronic music and modern classical. The instrumentation is a mixture of the acoustic—piano, strings, and even clarinet, featuring on the jazzy “The Autumn Journal”—and synthetic, with gentle synth washes and subtle percussion underlying most of the album. “Orion” is perhaps the most beat-driven offering, whose trip-hop pulse and laser-sharp glitchy ratchets hearken back to Dobson’s work on the Toytronic releases from the early 2000s.

Each track brings a slightly different attitude to the central theme, from the meditative, piano-centered “The End is Just the Beginning” to the orchestral peaks and valleys of “Sentences,” which Dobson describes as a “recontextualised” take on Henry Purcell’s “Canzona from his Funeral Sentences for Queen Mary.” As the album notes accurately describes, it “soars and swells, building up into an expanse of sound before finally falling back into fragility.”

For me, the longest track is also the best, exemplifying everything this album is about. “Gold of the Azure” stretches to ten minutes. It starts with a serene, shifting ambience, leading to a gamelan-style percussive melody of increasing layers and complexity, an interlude to release the built-up tension, and then a sublime woodwind-led conclusion.

Contemplative, finely wrought, and serene, Digitonal thread the optimistic, irrepressible spirit of MacNeice’s Fanfare for the Makers through the entire fabric of the album:

As climbers climb a peak because it is there,
As life can be confirmed even in suicide:

To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair.

Set the Weather Fair is available on Just Music. [Bandcamp]