An ambient season
I've spent more time listening to instrumental this year than ever before. I'm not sure why; lots of upheaval (a calming tool), making more time for reading (a background hum), wandering hills (quietly cinematic).
With winter rushing in here in Scotland, I've spent the past few weeks getting lost inside The Wringing Cloth, the wonderful new album from Old Saw. Old Saw are a New England collective, and this sprawling collection of songs was "recorded on 1/4" tape at locations in New England 2022-2024". Two years worth of material, then, but all hung together like a day of low cloud, like a snapshot of one heave of weather that settled and didn't move.
It features a seven musicians who scatter a series of instrumental sounds, including but not limited to: banjo, fiddle, harmonium, reed organ, pedal steel, lap steel, resonator, and even 'metal objects'. It might be classed as ambient but it drifts away from being only that. It is something like a folk soundscape, cinematic I suppose, but the soundtrack to something heavy and meandering; seasonal, greying landscapes in slow-crawl widescreen.
It's beautiful in all of its decay. Ambiguous enough for you to conjure your own imagery around it, and solid enough to keep your attention as it rolls on and on, across the windswept, rain-lashed landscape it lays out.
A pocketful of even newer releases are already digging their nails in too. There's Múscailte, a new album from Dublin's Gareth Quinn Redmond who traces his fascination with Kankyō Ongaku – or environmental music – into something beautifully inquisitive. Inspired by the legendary Japanese composer Hiroshi Yoshimura, the new record is warm and compelling. It's presented as an "album composed for the soft unfolding of morning" and sits perfectly within those hazy confines.
Another Irish release also released this week is the playful and affectionate collaboration between Aoife Ní Bhriain & Cormac McCarthy. Focusing on fiddle and piano, Cosán Casta "reimagines Irish traditional music through original compositions, reinterpretations of archival tunes, and a fusion of classical and jazz idioms".
A near 50-minute journey, the album is beautifully detailed, the sound of two bright and distinctive minds coming together to form something new from puzzle pieces they've discovered along the way. Skirting with the traditional, but never afraid to tell its own story, it's an affectionate, inventive and always gorgeous piece of work.
