Towards the Blue Peninsula is possessed of a grandeur that belies the lowercase subtlety of the compositions, bearing a freight of ineffability, the key the finding of a feeling of something somehow transcendent in enigmatic tonalities.
In a review of a previous Keith Berry Infraction, The Ear That Was Sold to a Fish, affordance theory was invoked, his music seen as a kind of ‘sonic prosthetic for personal world-making.’ Pretentious maybe, but somehow in keeping with an artist with goals beyond—one purporting ‘to plant a little seed in the listener that given the right conditions could grow into something far bigger than the work itself.‘ So… no slick mouse-click trickster he, steeped in Eastern philosophy (Wabi-Sabi, Zen, I Ching) and Sufi poetry (Hafiz, Rumi)—not to mention Western Thought (whisper it quietly: Huxley, Castaneda, Nietzsche). Early works on labels like Trente Oiseaux led to his bracketing with lowercasers like Günter and Roden, Feldman’s minimalism often attendant, and the air of Rabelais ware everywhere. Yet extremes of microsound and minimalism are largely subsumed to more fulsome expression, harmonic development and textural richness, marking him more a croney of Drone-Lords of The North—of Potter, Tate and Bradley, of Coleclough and Chalk.
Berry trails a decade of releases, from debut The Golden Boat to The Ear… and A Strange Feather, to The Cartesian Plane, each sui generis, yet adepts will spot his acousmatic signature straightaway; the bent for eerie beauty, for quiet, evanescent soundscapes—a slow unravelling of unmoored revenance, of cryptic vanishings. Towards the Blue Peninsula draws on Koda’s Movements, a decade-old low-light classic from Infraction‘s early back catalog, making of it something more aquatic and windswept. The sound is expansive and unreal, Berry’s summoning to oneiric elsewhereness a complement to the allusion to Joseph Cornell’s eponymous work, which seems to describe a kind of imaginary projected existence. It’s also reminiscent of his collaboration with photographer Iain Stewart, 58º North, a video work on which his OST is ‘naturally’ linked to a sometimes serene, sometimes perturbed, gaze on the sea’s movements and the horizon’s aspect. The way to Berry’s Blue Peninsula finds us similarly engulfed in swathes of rich timbrality—sombre swells streaked with soft digitalis and odd environmentalia, granular orchestration flecked with strange sutures. A spatial driftzone between the nothingness of Köner and the eternity of Basinski (or vice versa), engrossing drones and submerged melodies emerge from soft staticky pillows in languorous recursions, dense chord-shift blurred in washed-out tone-clouds.
Towards the Blue Peninsula is possessed of a grandeur that belies the lowercase subtlety of the compositions, bearing a freight of ineffability, the key the finding of a feeling of something somehow transcendent in enigmatic tonalities—‘…a kind of strange new romanticism, marrying postmodern compositional sensibilities of self-conscious forms with the deep inner content of romanticism.’
Towards the Blue Peninsula is out now on Infraction.
