Edition of 400 copies LP from this duo featuring Timo Van Luijk of Af Ursin and collaborator with Christoph Heemann, NNCK et al. Voile Au Vent presents a series of piano improvisations embedded in dark, symphonic instrumental settings. Some of the most purely malevolent sounds to be associated with Luijk, aspects of Voile Au Vent almost sound like Coil circa “Dark River” with looming electronics providing an eerie backdrop to the broken bones of a piano. Later tracks bring in cut-up sound sources, shadowy samples and smears of Andrew Chalk-style drone to give the feel of Gavin Bryars’ Sinking Of The Titanic re-scored for one of Joe Jones’ automatic orchestras. Recommended.

Latest release from Tim van Luijk (In Camera, Af Ursin et al) is another beautifully packaged blat of bewitching low-level drone/improvisation, this time in the company of long-term collaborator Kris Vanderstraeten. Mostly acoustic, with a heavy percussive element, High Noon touches on a similar kind of tactile low-level free interaction as practiced by Imai-era East Bionic Symphonia, walking the line between more established modes of improvised/psychedelic thought with a rigour and a commitment to the beauty of unadorned form that is truly uncommon. There are repeat-vocal sounds that resemble hypnotised ascetics floating high above the north pole, half-heard nursery rhyme melodies ala Af Ursin and the kind of complex timbral constructs that please the inner eye as much as the outer ear. Totally beautiful, edition of 250 copies on white vinyl with a silkscreened cover by Vanderstraeten and highly recommended.

In what might be the greatest international drone summit to date Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk, two of the most forward-thinking slow-motion instrumentalists, have launched a new group project, Elodie, that features guest appearances from both Daisuke Suzuki and Ian Middleton. Chalk and Van Luijk have a long history together, both at one point playing as members of Mirror. With Elodie their focus is on combining landscape soundings and hazily rendered arcs of melody with actual small instrumentation, strings, music boxes, acoustic guitars etc... Parts of this come across as the most pastoral songwriter side that Andrew has ever been involved in and it’s all the more bewitching for it. Here Van Luijk plays the Nick Drake to Chalk’s Joe Boyd, re-imagining “Way To Blue” as a psycho-spatial investigation of the endless hues on the way to dawn with heavenly choirs of bird song over rolling acoustic guitar that could almost be taken straight from the legendary Hawaiian 1973 acid folk masterpiece, These Trails, or even the music of Harry Partch. There are shorter tracks that feel like snippets of eternal music, sudden streams of bagpipe tone or Cro-Magnon court music that comes over like The Third Ear Band, but the overall feel is wide-open, pastoral. This is folk-based drone that succeeds in joining the dots between traditional rural forms and future-visioned kosmische with a gentle, celebratory aspect that is pure Chalk. Edition of 400 copies. Just fantastic, highly recommended!

Excellent follow-up to the duo of Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk’s recent Echos Pastoraux LP, in gorgeous handmade sleeves by Chalk. Elodie is more instrumentally focussed and varied than the bulk of Chalk’s solo drone work, creating beautiful melancholy miniatures from combinations of piano, guitar, bells, music boxes and reeds. Parts of this set remind me of Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille’s Come Night album, particularly the lucid settings of Venusian guitar and the breathy saxophone but cut with the alien atmospherics of the great Steve Lacy/Yuji Takahashi/Takehisa Kosugi album Distant Voices. Indeed, this is the closest Chalk has come to cutting a dreamtime acid folk record, with an atmosphere that is somewhere between Joe Boyd’s Witchseason productions and some of the more pastoral Kosmische Musik sides. And when they do trip over into all-out drone - the instruments subtly smeared and now singing to themselves - the effect is uniquely otherworldly. Highly recommended.