Linus Vandewolken / Het vlier, een hommel op aarde

Ideologically, if that is any way to apprehend art at all, albums like this can trouble me, such is its leave-it-in-any-setting prettiness, its take-it-anywhere good manners, its clinging to the bosom of folk identity, its auratic distance (even flight) from any form of the ugly deep trough of now, that it must be reactionary. And yet, two tracks in to this 15-track album of music played on the near extinct and mostly fretless Flemish hommel, a long spell is cast that makes me stare at the grain of wood in my desk and fall into that coveted mode of deep listening where every thumb abraded string resonates with a plain and restful truth. 

Blake Hargeaves / Improvisations On The Pipe Organs Of Europe

This record might read different to Europeans, I guess. Is it stodge and reverence and old stone and the low stink of hymn books? Something bound to Bach and rules and the virgin? Blake Hargreaves is a new worlder like me, excited enough to find something exotic in a grand tour of old organs and a close enough listener to finger new feeling from each encounter. There is nothing abusive in the improvisation here, no flock-bothering atonality or shrill modernism, no Charlemagne Palestine key-jamming, mass saturation or extended technique, just onward steps of refined inner logic (or the wandering anti-logic of a reverie), extrapolations of musical thought and excerpts of dialogues with tradition and the materiality of acoustic time and space - recorded here to beguiling effect.