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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, “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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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.