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Jean-Noël Rebilly and Andrew Chalk, “Tsilla” (An’archives, 2023)

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This is the second duo collaboration between Chalk and Rebilly, as the pair previously surfaced with L’état Intermédiaire back in 2018. Their shared history goes back to at least 2012 though, as they teamed up with Vikki Jackman for A Paper Doll’s Whisper Of Spring. While details about Tsilla are less scarce than usual due to its release on An’archives rather than Chalk’s famously terse Faraway Press imprint, I still know very little about Rebilly other than the fact that he plays the clarinet. Beyond that, I am unwilling to hazard any guesses about who is playing what here, as both artists’ contributions are largely blurred into a painterly haze (not entirely unfamiliar territory for Chalk). Far more relevant than the instrumentation is the album’s inspiration: engraver Cécile Reims, whose “denuded landscapes,” “spiraling abstractions,” and “unearthly radiance” may have inspired Chalk’s visual art as well. If not, Reims is at least a kindred spirit and her collaborations with Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini, and Salvador Dali probably make a decent enough consolation prize. Reims’s deepest impact on Tsilla may have been upon the process rather than the outcome, however, as the pair set out to honor her “tender weaving of emotional complexity carved with the hand-held and simple tools of artisans” in their own way (“a similar transfiguration of base materials”). Regardless of how it was made, Tsilla is quite a unique album in the Chalk canon, as the best pieces evoke a beautifully nightmarish strain of impressionism.

The album opens in unexpectedly tense and disturbing fashion with “Pliskiné,” as shivering strings quiver in dissonant harmonies over a bed of subtle, slowly shifting drones like a swarm of hallucinatory bees with bad intentions. For better or worse, that particular descent into horror is not a representative one, though Tsilla is quite a dark and uncharacteristically heavy album for Chalk (and presumably for Rebilly as well). “Pliskiné” aside, the album’s other deep plunge into nightmare territory is “Hauteville,” which feels like a groaning, slow-motion descent into squirming, buzzing cosmic horror at its most exquisite. In general, the longer pieces tend to be the strongest while the shorter pieces feel more like bridges or interludes, though “Visages d’Espagne” is a notable exception that resembles a seasick duet between a koto and a vibrato pedal.

Elsewhere, “L’embouchure Du Temps” is yet another unsettling highlight, as it arguably resembles the curdled and time-stretched sounds of an infernal brass band experienced while in the throes of a fever delirium. I also noted that it sounded more like a cursed fog than a musical composition, which is probably a compliment of sorts. The closing “Retour À Kibarty” is yet another gem and a well-placed one at that, as it almost feels like a vivid sunrise is swelling from the horizon in a doomed but valiant attempt to break the album’s spell and burn away all the lingering darkness and murk. That said, if it actually was a sunrise, it would probably be one with a lot of bruised purples and burning oranges, as it is still quite a haunting (and haunted) piece. In fact, it even dissipates like a ghost in the end to helpfully punctuate the disquietingly supernatural feel of Chalk and Rebilly’s drones.

Needless to say, the fact that Andrew Chalk has released yet another beautifully realized, richly nuanced, and immersive album should surprise no one at this point in his career, but Tsilla nevertheless stands out as a fascinating outlier due to its unusually dissonant, smeared, and unsettling atmosphere.

Listen here.

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Andrew Chalk, “The End Times” (ICR, 2022)

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Keeping up with Andrew Chalk’s discography has always been an amusingly challenging endeavor, but the challenge has shifted from pouncing on limited edition physical releases to vigilantly ensuring that he does not quietly surface with a substantial new opus of some kind without my notice. The most recent substantial new opus is this one on Colin Potter’s ICR label, which is billed as Chalk’s “first new solo album in five years.” It certainly feels like a major statement to me, though the meaning of terms like “new” and “album” can be quite blurry and elusive given Chalk’s singularly minimalist approach to providing album details. In any case, The End Times was (perhaps prophetically) recorded earlier this year and marks a rare CD release after Chalk’s recent run of cassettes. Beyond that, further details are quite slim. That is just fine by me, as the only thing that actually matters is that Andrew Chalk is still making incredibly beautiful and distinctive music, as The End Times is a characteristically sublime and immersive dreamscape of tender melodies, elegantly shifting moods, and vividly detailed textures.

The opening “House of the Holy” provides an appropriately representative introduction to the album’s overall aesthetic, as a vaporous melody of blurred, lingering notes unfolds over a gently gurgling pulse. As the album unfolds, a few subtle new details emerge that set The End Times apart from some of Chalk’s other recent work, but the most prominent features throughout are the quivering, liquid-like character of the notes and the ephemeral brevity of the pieces. Rather than evolving and expanding, these 13 pieces instead feel like a series of enigmatic mirages that offer a fleeting and flickering glimpse of heaven before dissolving back into nothingness.

Given all the gentle, blurred sounds and the tone of meditative reverie, it is deceptively easy to mistake The End Times for ambient music, yet it reveals itself to be considerably more than that for those willing to fully immerse themselves in Chalk’s slow-motion fantasia of beautiful details and small yet significant events. I view it as somewhat akin to looking through a rain-streaked window–it is easy to gaze through the glass and simply think “today is a wet and overcast day,” but it is also possible to appreciate how the individual droplets quiver and roll down the glass or how the streaks of water subtly bend and warp the appearance of the outside world. Albums like this are the reason why the genre term “lowercase” needed to exist, as Chalk’s compositions are incredibly rich, but the size of the reward is directly proportional to how closely one listens.

While Chalk’s vision admittedly tends to focus on the metaphorical trees, he does not entirely forget the metaphorical forest, so there are some more overt pleasures to be found as well. The most immediately gratifying is “Midsummar,” which feels like a bittersweetly melodic piano miniature transformed into quavering, viscous droplets of bliss, but it also features a bit of a gently hallucinatory Ghost Box/library music feel. Elsewhere, the shimmering, sad beauty of “The End Times” steals the show as the beating heart of the album, while “War Horns” uses a simple, ghostly melody as the canvas for a micro-scale fireworks display of Pole-esque hisses, clicks, and pops. “At Sunset” is yet another quiet stunner, as Chalk transforms a slow parade of frayed, swelling tones into something that feels like time lapse footage of the psychotropic bloom of an otherworldly flower. More than any other piece on the album, “At Sunset” illustrates the singular magic of a great Andrew Chalk piece, as he is without peer at sculpting compositions until nothing remains but a fleeting and fragile moment of simple poignant beauty.

Listen here.

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Andrew Chalk, “Paradise Lost” (Faraway Press, 2021)

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Newly reissued on vinyl (and digitally) with beautiful new artwork, Paradise Lost was originally released as a cassette back in 2019. As is the norm for many Chalk releases, additional details beyond the fact that it exists are quite thin, but this one takes that to an amusing extreme, as the Discogs entry for the original cassette notes “label and artist name are not listed on the release.” 

That said, I believe I can say with moderate certainty that these two longform pieces were recorded on an 8-track reel-to-reel between 2016 and 2018 and that Chalk primarily played a synthesizer. Also, his Ghosts on Water bandmate Naoko Suzuki contributed some very well-hidden vocals and created the artwork for the original tape. 

To some degree, it makes sense that this album originally surfaced as a very limited-small run tape, as it does not feel like one of Chalk’s more significant opuses, but it is quite an enjoyable and interesting release nonetheless. In fact, the title piece feels like legitimately prime Andrew Chalk material to me, though I suspect many longtime fans will be more fascinated by the surprising and divergent “This Pendent World.”

One interesting bit of information that I stumbled upon while researching this album was a blurb from Daisuke Suzuki’s Siren Records noting that this album “strongly recalls the atmosphere of home recording in the ’80s.” I got exactly the same impression myself from the opening “This Pendent World,” as I had scribbled down that it felt like a duel between two very different artists from the golden age of private press New Age: one kosmische-inspired synth wizard hellbent on taking me to space and another guy who just wants to lull me into a blissful, bucolic reverie with some pretty string swells. There are also some traces of a third guy who closely resembles contemporary Andrew Chalk, as there is a loose melodic theme of wobbly, liquid tones likely originating from an electric piano. 

While that is certainly an odd collision to encounter on a Milton-themed Andrew Chalk record, it works surprisingly well, amiably and amorphously drifting and curling like a trail of smoke. The following “Paradise Lost” is similarly form-averse, but in a much more compelling way, as its frayed and smeared swells of warm synth tones feel teasingly just out of focus. Additionally lurking within the artfully blurred dream-fog are a slow-motion tumble of acoustic guitar fragments, ghostly traces of Naoko’s lovely singing, and probably some pedal steel too. I am tempted to make a wince-inducing pun on the album title here, but “Paradise Lost” is simply too beautiful of a piece to deserve such an indignity, vividly evoking the slowly streaking and shifting colors of an especially gorgeous sunset.

Samples can be found here.

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Andrew Chalk, “Incidental Music” (Faraway Press, 2021)

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In characteristic fashion, Andrew Chalk quietly released this cassette last fall and it is damn near impossible to find out anything about it other than the fact that it compiles pieces recorded between 2008 and 2016 and features regular collaborators Timo von Luijk and Tom James Scott on one piece. 

All outward signs suggest that Incidental Music was intended as a modest and minor release, so it was quite a pleasant surprise to find that it is actually one of the stronger Chalk releases from the last few years, roughly approximating the slippery, shivering, and floating bliss of 2015’s A Light at the Edge of the World in more bite-sized form. While there is enough variety to periodically remind me that this is indeed a collection of orphaned songs rather than a focused and complete new statement, the quality of these treasures from the vault is high enough to make such a distinction feel quite irrelevant.

The album immediately dissolves into sublime impressionist heaven with the opening “Fallen Angel,” which captures Chalk at the height of his textural and harmonic powers. It is the sort of piece that people tend to describe with terms like “ambient drift,” but it makes me think of water droplets quivering on a gently swaying spiderweb: there is an underlying structure, but the true beauty lies primarily on how the individual notes linger, shiver, and bleed together. It also highlights Chalk’s singular talent for making extremely nuanced and sophisticated music feel organic and effortless, as “Fallen Angel” feels loose and spontaneous, yet delicately shifts moods while deftly avoiding any straightforward melodies or chords at all. 

While several of the following pieces return to roughly the same aesthetic with varying degrees of success (perfectly fine by me), the second half of the album is a bit more diverse and offers some more unexpected and rare pleasures. While I am still not entirely won over by the warm synth reverie of “Solas,” I absolutely love “Sparkled in My Eyes,” which sounds like a fever dream organ soundtrack to some masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema a la The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. 

Elsewhere, “From Mountain Tops The Dusky Clouds” crafts a languorously undulating fog with gentle drones and subtle wah-wah effects, while “To Many A Harp” conjures a wonderfully haunted and tender scene with a slow-motion melody of wobbly sustained tones. At least two or three of those pieces are stone-cold gems, but the entire album sustains a wonderfully immersive and absorbing spell.

Samples can be found here.

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Andrew Chalk and Daisuke Suzuki, “Yama to Nashi” (Siren, 2018)

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The work of Andrew Chalk and Daisuke Suzuki seems as if it has been intertwined forever, so I was somewhat startled to discover that this is their first new collaborative release in almost a decade. As befits the re-convergence of these two masters of understated tranquility, Yama to Nashi feels like a relaxed and unhurried reunion of old friends rather than a bold new vision. As such, it is a somewhat minor (if lovely) addition to the Siren/Faraway Press oeuvre that mostly lingers in familiar territory, but there are a couple of divergent gems lurking amidst these new pieces that longtime fans will not want to miss.

For the most part, the languorous and glistening opening piece (“Threads From The Milky Way”) sets the tone for the entire album, establishing the overarching aesthetic of sketchlike vignettes of dreamlike, liquescent bliss. It is difficult to tell exactly how Chalk and Suzuki are getting their blurred and slippery tones, but I believe there is a processed electric piano at the heart of these recordings. As the album unfolds, however, Chalk and Suzuki start to drift further and further away from their lazily glimmering and rippling sound pools and both the mood and the palette start to deepen (and darken). The first real shadows start to fall across Yama on the third piece, “Suzume,” which casts a mournful spell by weaving discordant harmonies from glacially swelling strings and drifting smears of synth tones. 

Curiously, that veil of sadness dispels almost as suddenly and unexpectedly as it appeared, as the wonderful “Shelf on Wall” shakes off its initial moody reverie to blossom into a surreal field recording of a Japanese parade. From there, the piece continues to be a pleasantly inventive and evocative surprise, as the parade seems to partially fade away, but leaves a lovely and lyrical flute melody in its wake that dreamily drifts through a woozy fog of gentle arpeggios, crashing waves, and a few lingering tendrils of the raucous festivities (marching men, clattering percussion, children’s voices). To my ears, it is the album’s true centerpiece (conveniently located in the center of the album, no less), but it is not without strong competition from the album’s final stretch.

Although it is considerably shorter, I am also quite fond of “A Sentry on The Roof,” which augments its blearily impressionistic cascades of watery electric piano tones with the loud and fitful buzzing of a large bee. That bee makes a surprising amount of difference, which highlights an unusual trend the runs throughout Yama to Nashi: the purely instrumental pieces feel like the soundtrack to a gorgeous sunrise or seaside vista that I am not seeing, while the pieces that prominently feature field recording are considerably more effective at drawing me into the scene. I am a bit curious about why Chalk and Suzuki did not pursue that elegant blurring together of swooning, hazy ambiance and crisp, vibrant textures from the natural world more, as it definitely feels like that synthesis elevates this collaboration into something more transcendent and unique when it happens. 

If I had to guess, however, I suspect that the reason is that most of Yama to Nashi consists of Chalk and Suzuki’s stronger improvisations that occurred on the road to composing the album’s epic closing title piece. On one hand, “Yama To Nashi” is not radically different from the rest of the album, as it is built from gently tumbling arpeggios and warmly radiant washes of synthesizer (though there are some buried bird noises hiding in the mix). There is, however, an unexpectedly strong motif resembling a shuddering, digitalized bird call that periodically tears through the placid idyll. That certainly livens thing up, though it is not quite as dramatic as it sounds. The real difference is mostly just time: Chalk and Suzuki allow “Yama to Nashi” to languorously stretch out for over 20 minutes and that suits it beautifully. Duration makes a world of difference with music in this vein: a glimpse of heaven is nice, but getting a chance to linger in it is by far a superior experience.

As is true of most Andrew Chalk albums (both with and without Suzuki) there is very little to grumble about with this album: Chalk and Suzuki have a long history of making lovely and lush music together and Yama to Nashi ends a long hiatus to bring the world more of it. That pleases me. I am, however, the hapless victim of my own high expectations, as I hoped this welcome reunion would result in an enduring classic. Yama is not an enduring classic, though “Shelf on Wall” seems like a strong step towards a more ambitious and immersive future opus. Hopefully it will not take another decade for that to happen, but I am sure I can find some way to keep busy while I wait if it does. In the meantime, Yama to Nashi is a solid to return to form that adds one more quietly beautiful longform work to the Chalk/Suzuki canon.

Listen here.

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Elodie, “Vieux Silence” (Ideologic Organ, 2017)

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For their latest album, the duo of Andrew Chalk and Timo van Luijk (Af Ursin) take an unexpected detour from their impressive run of limited self-released albums for an appearance on Stephen O’Malley’s eclectic Ideologic Organ imprint. To honor this auspicious occasion, the core line-up is fleshed out with returning collaborators Tom James Scott and Jean-Noël Rebilly, as well as pedal steel guitarist Daniel Morris. In all other respects, however, Vieux Silence is every bit a traditional Elodie album, unfolding as a flickering impressionist dream that seems to emanate from a time and place totally unlike our own. As an album, it does not necessarily tower above the rest of Elodie’s consistently fine oeuvre, but the title piece might be the single most achingly gorgeous piece that Chalk and van Luijk have recorded together to date.

As a longtime Andrew Chalk fan, I am hesitant to describe the collaboration of Elodie as greater than the sum of its parts, yet something transcendent undeniably occurs when Chalk and van Luijk get together. To some degree, I can see shades of Chalk’s tender and quietly beautiful drone-based aesthetic and hints of Af Ursin’s shadowy and chameleonic otherworldliness on Vieux Silence, but it feels like such an uncannily seamless blurring of styles that neither artist seems to be steering the ship. At their best, it feels like this album is a séance and Elodie are channeling some kind of gorgeous and languorous music from the spirit realm. The opening “La Vallée Du Sommeil” is a perfect example of such a feat, as its simple and heavenly synth melody seems to vaporously float through a patina of tape hiss like smoke. 

The best reference point that I can conjure is that it resembles what Angelo Badalamenti would probably sound like if he were suddenly taken by The Spirit and started composing rapturous hymns to God rather than collaborating with David Lynch. In fact, the brief piece (“Corridor”) that follows even resembles an organ hymn, though Rebilly’s bittersweet, breathy clarinet melodies inject a bit more soul and harmonic complexity than normally found in such fare. That aesthetic of soulful, unhurried, and simple beauty veiled in a thin fog of unreality reaches its apex with the title piece though, which dreamily pulses and weaves an absolutely gorgeous fantasia of warm chords, gently cascading arpeggios, and a repeating snatch of ghostly vocal melody. It kind of sounds like an achingly beautiful, slow-motion waltz enhanced by a haunted Victrola.

Even when they are not at their best, Elodie remain extremely damn good—the only real difference is simply that the illusion dissipates enough to feel like the work of human musicians with specific instruments playing planned compositions. For example, “La Nuit Voilée” is essentially a fluid and haunting pedal steel solo over a shifting bed of gently stuttering, melancholy chords. 

“Au Point du Jour,” on the other hand, sounds like some sort of missing link between modern classical and Volcano the Bear, blending a slowly tumbling and rippling minor key piano motif with a surreal backdrop of vocal moans, strange breath-generated textures, and some eerily strangled-sounding bird-like whistles. Later, “Le Temps d’Antan” essentially offers up its negative image: a radiant dawn dispelling all of the previous darkness with a lovely piano melody languorously wending its way through a quiet idyll of lingering reverb, soft breezes, and distant birds. 

After all of that elegantly blurred beauty and nuance, however, Vieux Silence nearly ends on bit of a perplexing forceful note, as “Entre Deux Mondes” introduces an ominous and cinematic-sounding string theme that feels like it could have come from just about any skilled soundtrack composer. Fortunately, it eventually segues into a wonderfully dreamlike and spectral finale (“La Saison Blanche”) which feels like two indistinct, supernatural Theremin-like melodies slowly dancing and intertwining over an unpredictable bed of shifting chords and passing shadows of dissonance.

Unsurprisingly, the best pieces on Vieux Silence (“La Vallée Du Sommeil” and “Vieux Silence”) are the ones with the most gorgeous melodies, but the true brilliance of this project lies in the less tangible details. The most significant is probably the duo’s talent for smoky, elusive-sounding textures, elegantly sidestepping the common peril of turning everything into a soft-focus, reverb-swathed blur. Instead, Elodie somehow make their melodies feel a beautiful half-remembered dream: strong and clear, yet still enigmatically obscured by haze and mist. 

A crucial corollary to that is Elodie’s lightness of touch, a delicate balancing act that separates an achingly beautiful unreality from a mere suite of lovely chamber music. Elodie do not always fall on the right side of that equation here, admittedly, but the results are singularly sublime when they do manage to nail it (and I cannot think of many other artists who could even hit that target once). 

Less essential, yet still significant is the duo’s surreptitious harmonic sophistication, as there are almost always shifting harmonic colors hovering all around the main theme and Chalk and van Luijk are not afraid to bring some fleeting shadow to their languorous heaven with flickers and undercurrents of dissonance. More succinctly put: there are some fine compositions here, but it is the masterful and nuanced execution that makes Vieux Silence something far deeper, more mysterious, more layered, and more movingly fragile than the quiet, warmly lovely melodies would otherwise suggest.

Listen here.

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Andrew Chalk, “A Light At The Edge Of The World” (Faraway Press, 2017)

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I was initially planning to write something like “somehow this wonderfully sublime 2015 release managed to slip by me completely unnoticed,” but immediately realized that there was no mystery at all: the only effective way to keep abreast of Andrew Chalk’s quietly expanding oeuvre is to actively keep an eye on the Faraway Press website and hope that anything I gamble on is up to Chalk’s usual high standards. 

While a few of his recent releases have admittedly been a bit too pastoral to fully connect with me, the glistening and gently hallucinatory reverie of this single extended piece for electric piano completely hits the mark. In some ways it reminds me of William Basinski’s eroding tape loops or Steve Roach’s classic Structures From Silence album, but not in any sort of direct way. Rather, A Light At The End of The World just feels like a mesmerizing soundscape of almost liquid textures that I could happily listen to an infinite loop for hours.

At its surface, this album is essentially a single very simple and meditative motif extended for album-length duration. There is no clear beginning or clear end, as “A Light at the Edge of the World” essentially just begins happening and then eventually stops happening with no overtly significant evolution in-between. Rather, Chalk is content to just quietly, tenderly, and languorously improvise around a few arpeggios. The magic, of course, lies in the details, as Chalk has made his career as a master of nuance and understatement and this album perversely takes those (non-extreme) tendencies to their hypnotically beautiful extreme. 

The single most striking aspect here is the glistening tone that Chalk conjures from his piano, as each individual note seems like a sun-dappled droplet of water slowly rolling down a windowpane. That curiously radiant, fluid, and organic texture, coupled with the flowing, arrhythmic pace of the notes combines to evoke a slow-motion cascade of shimmering globes leaving a blearily spectral and hallucinatory after-image in their wake. Chalk truly weaves a near-perfect illusion here, masterfully erasing himself from the picture to leave just a lazily undulating mist of warm and elegantly blurred heaven that seems to extend forever. In short, this album is basically a lysergic summer rain experienced in extreme slow-motion (not a particularly common aesthetic).

Naturally, creating a texturally rich and dreamily shifting soundscape that feels like a living organic entity is considerably more complex than it may seem from the apparent simplicity of the central theme. While I have admittedly encountered a few loops that were perfect enough to warrant infinite repetition, the idea of an endless loop or floating stasis tends to be a hell of a lot more compelling than the reality. Consequently, maintaining such an illusion requires a masterful sleight of hand to inconspicuously sneak in some much needed unpredictability and dynamic variability. 

Chalk achieves that objective by quietly ensuring that his rippling tumble of individual notes unfolds over a constantly shifting haze of sustained lower tones. Also, while he is not overt about it, the arpeggios in the foreground lazily follow the drift of the underlying chords rather than lingering around the same small cluster of notes. Consequently, what feels like a warm, amorphous drift is actually a glacially unfolding flux of constantly evolving new harmonies (and one that is beautifully deepened by the lingering, quavering cloud of overtones to boot).

Less significantly, Chalk peppers the piece with a host of small-scale dynamic touches, such as understated space-y whooshes and washes of hiss. ¬†His greatest small-scale dynamic feats occur with the central arpeggio motif though, as he sensitively varies his attack to give his notes a wonderfully physical and multi-dimensional feel. It seems as though they are billowing through the mist at varying levels with varying degrees of force: some seem like they barely break the surface, while others feel like a small-scale eruption. 

In Chalk’s hands, the cumulative effect of all these small acts and behind-the-scenes plate-spinning is quite a wonderfully absorbing spell that feels like a natural event. I am always in awe of composers who manage to completely dissolve into their work (there are not many around). Naturally, I feel a bit silly hailing an Andrew Chalk album for all of the same slow-burning, nuanced, and thoughtful virtues that essentially define the bulk of his oft-wonderful oeuvre, but this album definitely feels like one of the more immersive and perfectly executed jewels in his sprawling and under-heard discography.

Listen here.

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Elodie, “Odyssee” (Faraway Press, 2016)

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This collaboration between Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk (Af Ursin) has been active since 2011, yet this is the first of their albums that I have actually heard, as Van Luijk shares Chalk’s love of limited, small press-style releases. As a result, Elodie’s output has mostly been a series of vinyl-only releases from Belgium and Japan, though Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ has thankfully stepped up to get their next album to a wider audience. 

On paper, Odyssee seems like a very poor choice for my first Elodie experience, as it has two traits that generally make me steer clear of an album: it is both a live recording and the soundtrack to a film. In reality, however, this album is quietly stunning, taking Debussy-style Impressionism into gorgeously smoky, twilit, and eerily hallucinatory territory.

Odyssee consists of just one 33-minute piece, “Musique En Scène II,” which was recorded live at the Geräuschwelten Festival Festival in Münster in 2015. Although the release itself is characteristically lean on background information or useful details, the piece was apparently performed as accompaniment to a film that Van Luijk made that very evening. Since the film did not exist earlier that day, it is probably safe to say that the music was completely improvised. It certainly does not sound like it though, nor does it sound at all live (until the audience begins clapping at the end, anyway). 

More importantly, it also does not sound particularly like an Andrew Chalk album, nor does it bear all that much resemblance to what little Af Ursin I have heard (though Van Luijk is admittedly kind of multi-instrumentalist shape-shifter). I will not say that Elodie is necessarily greater than the sum of its parts here, but they certainly transcend whatever expectations I had and offer something a bit unexpected. 

Of course, part of that stylistic transformation is due to the piece’s simple structure and instrumentation, as it is essentially a languorous and Eastern-flavored flute solo centered on a small cluster of notes. For his part, Chalk provides a shifting and understated backdrop of quietly swelling synth chords, which is just perfect, as a large part of Odyssee‘s otherworldly beauty lies in the breathy intimacy of Van Luijk’s flute. Any further clutter would dilute the magic.

A more significant part of Odyssee‘s mesmerizing spell lies in the eerily melancholy and exotic mood, as it evokes nothing less than the exquisitely lonely sensation of being alone in a vast desert at night, though the piece gradually becomes somewhat less haunted-sounding as it progresses. There is also quite a bit of subtle beauty to be found in the details. For example, while Van Luijk’s woozily snaking flute melody is presented with crystalline clarity, it often leaves a ghostly afterimage that lingers in the air. That dreamy reverie is sometimes additionally enhanced by a sheen of feedback or chirping, trilling overtones. 

The overall effect is quite a surreal one, as the piece leaves a wake of lingering shadow and murk while simultaneously conjuring up a chorus of illusory birds. While that is essentially all the piece offers, that turns out to be more than enough, as both the melody and the atmosphere are quite entrancing. The piece does have a clear arc of sorts, however, as Chalk’s synthesizer gradually becomes a bit more intrusive, creating more complex harmonies. 

At the same time, the backdrop gradually shifts towards radiant major chords in the second half, though they are thankfully still vaporous enough to maintain the delicious spell of bleary unreality. Granted, I would probably like the piece more if the occasional shafts of light were even more toned down, yet I appreciate the ambiguous precariousness of the brighter interludes, as the encroaching undercurrent often suggests a mirage rather than an oasis.

Given its humble origins, Odyssee was probably intended as a somewhat minor release, but it is a weirdly perfect one. My only minor issue is with its brevity, which was no doubt dictated by the film. As far as I am concerned, it could have easily extended for twice as long, as the duo weave a gorgeously haunting dream scene from the first notes, nimbly walking the tightrope of providing enough small-scale dynamic variation to keep me deeply immersed while never disrupting that spell with anything more forceful. 

Granted, I was admittedly quite predisposed to like this album as an Andrew Chalk fan, but that only got my initial attention: if this album were not special, I would have quickly lost interest. Fortunately, Odyssee feels like something entirely unique. I love pleasant surprises. This is exactly the sort of hidden gem that I am always looking for, though I suspect it may herald the dawn of a painfully expensive scavenger hunt for the rest of Elodie’s oeuvre.

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Andrew Chalk, “Everyone Goes Home When The Sun Sets” (Faraway Press, 2016)

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This is kind of a companion piece to 2015’s absolutely sublime A Light At The Edge of The World, embracing a similarly fragile and dreamy mood, but taking a very different structural approach: while its processor took the shape of an extended and gorgeously floating stasis, Everyone Goes Home When The Sun Sets consists of nearly twenty discrete and ephemeral miniatures. That is not entirely new territory for Chalk, as that approach previously reached its apotheosis with 2012’s fine Forty-Nine Views In Rhapsodies’ Wave Serene, but it is still a curious step away from his strengths and his longform comfort zone. As such, Everyone Goes Home is not quite as immersive and hypnotic as Edge Of The World, but it is still a fairly unique release within Chalk’s canon, as its gently hallucinatory drift of glimmering vignettes offers its share of nuanced and distinctively Chalk-ian pleasures.

The overarching theme throughout Everyone Goes Home is one of elegant simplicity and fragility, as Chalk crafts most of these pieces from little more than rippling, reverb-soaked piano reveries or cascading and pointillist koto motifs. With few exceptions, Chalk seems quite intent on evoking something quite vaporous and dream-like, eschewing strong melodies and distinct edges in favor of impressionist and slow-motion tumbles of arpeggios. That is merely the foundation, however, as pieces like “Minsaori” seem far more like production experiments than fully formed compositions, as the delicately plinking lattice of notes takes on a subtly rich life of quietly squelching and whooshing textures. 

Both of those sides of Chalk’s artistry are clearly working towards a common cause, however, as his endgame seems to be the creation of a woozily pretty sort of soft-focus unreality, like the musical equivalent of a rippling sun-dappled pond or a snowfall experienced in extreme slow-motion with crystalline clarity. Granted, Andrew Chalk has essentially made an entire career out of slowing down time and blurring reality, but this album takes that approach to a greater extreme than usual, offering up a gently flickering fantasia of glistening and self-contained microcosmic soundworlds. There are certainly elements of Chalk’s characteristic drone impulses to be found, but the far more prevalent theme is that of space between notes, inviting me to focus my attention upon the timbre and texture of each individual note that slowly rolls across Chalk’s miniature sound-portrait.

Naturally, such an aesthetic is not an attention-grabbing one, so Everyone Goes Home When The Sun Sets is predominantly for the already converted: a certain element of trust is required to give these shimmering compositional droplets the necessary attention to unlock their small but exquisite pleasures. Occasionally, however, Chalk allows himself three or four minutes to stretch out into something a bit more substantial. My favorite of the pieces in that vein is “Silk String Quintet,” which beautifully combines a blurred and see-sawing sway with glittering, slow-motion washes of synthesizer chords. Not many other pieces offer much in the way of an actual pulse though, as the album’s other highlights rely upon alternate tactics to stand out. 

The gorgeous and too-brief “San Baladino,” for example, bolsters its shimmering and rippling backdrop with a lazily bittersweet synthesizer melody. Synthesizers appear again in “Misty Island,” serving as a lush and emotive backdrop of organ-like chords to Chalk’s languorous trickle of bleary piano tones. Yet another highlight is “Spiritual Lanterns,” which weaves a fragile and gently tumbling koto melody that is shadowed and enhanced by a lovely nimbus of understated and watery harmonies. 

The tenderly melancholy closer “Solstice” is yet another high point, as Chalk’s unhurried and quietly moving koto meditation cuts through a hissing, quavering haze of wah-wah sizzle. A similar tactic is employed with “Platform Under The Stars,” albeit with glistening electric piano substituted for koto. The subtle wah-wah use is a nice addition to Chalk’s palette, as his combined arsenal of effects enables his tender snatches of melody to seemingly hang in the air as a living, breathing, and squelching haze.

That said, I was initially a bit underwhelmed by the album, partly because I had loved A Light At The Edge Of The World and was hoping for more of the same. This is not an easy album to fall in love with even without the hurdle of unreasonable expectations though, as it kind of feels like a slightly warped Andrew Chalk record playing as I drift off to sleep and flicker in and out of consciousness. That is not inherently a bad thing, but it does not offer any solid ground to grasp onto: motifs rarely stick around longer than a few minutes, there are fragmented suggestions of melodies rather than actual melodies, everything feels wobbly and out-of-focus, the pieces all feel like similar variations upon a very constrained theme, and there is not any readily apparent arc unfolding as the album progresses. It ultimately grew on me quite a bit though, which I suppose makes this album the proverbial “slow-burner.” 

Granted, it will probably never be among my favorite Andrew Chalk albums, but it is a good one and I am glad that it exists: there are already plenty of excellent albums exploring other facets of Chalk’s vision, so an experiment like this is a welcome departure from the expected. There is a lot of fragmented and precariously quivering beauty to be found here: it just takes a bit more time and effort than usual to get acclimated to the unusual pacing and flow of these vignettes and sketches. Actually, “fragments” might be a far better term, as this album does not sound like a collection of half-finished ideas so much as it resembles a complete and coherent composition that has been purposely shattered. That may also be the perfect simile for Chalk’s aesthetic here: if a great Andrew Chalk album is like a beautiful and mysterious photograph that I can get lost in, Everyone Goes Home is like smashing the frame and studying the subtle refractions of light as the shards rain down and time slows to a complete stop.

Listen here.

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Andrew Chalk & Tom James Scott, “Wild Flowers” (Skire, 2013)

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In classic Andrew Chalk fashion, this wonderful new collaboration quietly surfaced last month on an extremely small label (Scott’s own Skire imprint) and very nearly slipped by me entirely. These pieces humbly originated as a few gently rippling, understated piano motifs that Scott composed while preparing for a performance at this year’s F.O.N. Fest, but later evolved into something much more when the recordings were handed off to Chalk. The resulting album is a pleasantly dreamlike, blurry, and spectral affair, approximating a very appealing middle ground somewhere between Harold Budd’s liquid pastoralism and Morton Feldman’s queasily dissonant pointillism.

The first side of Wild Flowers (it is currently a vinyl-only release) is consumed entirely by its longest piece, the 19-minute “Speaking To The Rose.” Another major piece, “Hornbeam,” composes the bulk of the B-side, but there is also room for a few short, more divergent pieces. Both of the major pieces share an extremely similar aesthetic, so there is not much point in differentiating them, aside from stating that “Rose” feels more bittersweet and meditative, while “Hornbeam” has a bit of a disquieting edge to it. I hate to use the word “ambient” here, as that seems woefully insufficient, but that is truly the closest available signpost: Chalk’s subdued strings form a hazy, melancholy fog around Scott’s simple, languorously unfolding melodies, achieving a kind of bleary and beautiful drifting stasis.

There is never any sense that either piece is progressing towards anything in particular in a conventional sense, as all the important activity occurs at a more subtle, small-scale level. The most beautiful single aspect of both “Rose” and “Hornbeam” is the same: the way that each of Scott’s notes seems to hang in the air gently quivering after being struck. I realize that is probably a very simple trick (add reverb), but it is executed beautifully, as there is plenty of space between notes to enjoy the decays, afterimages, and shifting harmonies left in their wake. Also, Chalk’s strings are employed masterfully throughout, alternating between ghostly near-silence and well-timed swells of coloration. The overall effect is a very mesmerizing and enigmatic reverie that both musicians skillfully avoid disrupting with any missteps or overly dramatic gestures.

Curiously, Scott and his piano seem completely absent from the two shorter string-based pieces (“Mayfly” and “Illumine”), which makes me think that Chalk belatedly composed them himself to give the album a more compelling arc (and to presumably fill the remaining space on the second side of the record). Regardless of their origins, their presence is quite welcome—particularly the roiling grandeur of “Mayfly,” which serves as a very effective bridge between the much more subdued long-form pieces. The one-minute-long “Illumine” seems to be just a brief reprise of “Mayfly,” but its slow, graceful fade in and out makes for wonderfully bittersweet and Romantic coda to yet another gorgeous Andrew Chalk album. This was definitely an inspired pairing, as Chalk and Scott’s complementary styles seem to bring out the best in one another.

Listen here.

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