The Amsterdam label Shimmering Moods have just announced pre-orders for a new album by Andrew Sherwell, whose Invocation of Deities by Working of Ritual Instruments, a composition drawing on the melancholy timbres of English church bells, we noticed in an earlier post.
The new album, Antiphon, is is available as a limited edition CD (60 copies) or as a download. It is announced by a highly evocative prose poem, beginning:
“Autumn in Albion is always magical. Gold, red, and bronze, the quivering leaves glow in the perpetually slanting light, light that reveals yet also creates the deepest of shadows. As the season unfolds, the leaves fall, the mists rise, and the clouds lower. And the veils get thinner. The dead are close now and so are others, others more wondrous and terrible”.
The work is inspired by ideas of visionary England, with glimpses of Avalon and Zion, and is dedicated to all ‘Wanderers in Arcady’, including William Blake and Arthur Machen.
The music is hushed, ethereal, stately, with distant reverberations of enigmatic noises and brief echoes of wordless liturgical voices. We feel like a stranger who has wandered into a semi-ruinous abbey or citadel where the strains of some invisible mystic ceremony may be heard, ever elusive among the shadowed courtyards and tapestried passages. And it is All Hallows’ Eve.
(Mark Valentine)
Thanks for this Mark. I have their previous album and love the them of this most recent release.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds as if Andrew Sherwell has been reading my mind. Everything mentioned in the above prose seems as if a mirror for my own feelings and thoughts about autumn in Albion. So very much as I experience and perceive it. I must listen to his previous CD and have already listened to the two tracks available currently from this latest offering. Thank you so much for the recommendation. I would never known this existed otherwise . The sort of theme I look for in various musical sources but only two or three pieces come to mind that come close to evoking the feelings or thoughts I have about autumn in Albion.
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