A new solo Andrew Chalk album is always an event at VT but when it’s as jaw-droppingly beautiful as The Cable House it’s a contender for album of the year. Released in an edition of only 300 copies, The Cable House comes in stunning handmade sleeves, with the graphics handprinted from original Chalk woodcuts and then tipped on. No two sleeves are alike and the woodblocks will never be reused. The music is drawn from an emotionally high-wire recording session that took place in 2008 with Chalk generating a number of sound environments using electronically treated piano. Chalk’s playing is stately, slow and extremely poignant, with tiny melodic phrases falling like cherry blossoms into pools of pale reverb and broken up, overloaded tape. At points some of the music recalls William Basinski’s haunting Disintegration Loops, at others the music of Christina Carter at her most heavenly or Fripp and Eno’s unreleased album of early music tape work. Right now, with autumn breaking into winter and the trees left bare and the orange streetlights and the dark nights, The Cable House feels like the perfect soundtrack. The A side is made up of five shorter tracks that suspend single notes in lugubrious tape treatments and subtle sonic dislocations while the flip consists of an impossibly beautiful side-long piece that further dilates the sounds and ups the emotional ante. Mesmerising, profoundly sad, a classic recording from the UK master of out-of-focus drone poetry. Highly recommended.
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PAST TIP OF THE TONGUES
