062: Keaton Henson - Like Chalk (Ft. Hinako Omori)
somnambulant - adjective: resembling or characteristic of a sleepwalker
As a musician, composer, visual artist, and poet, Keaton Henson has spent more than a decade releasing beautiful, often tremendously sad works into the world, enhancing his reputation as a truly unique artist while rarely playing live or committing to many interviews due to the anxiety he's suffered throughout his time in the public eye.
Where his first two albums set him up as the most tender of man-and-guitar singer-songwriters, his shape has been ever-shifting, his musical releases encompassing collaborations with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on Six Lethargies, and even a straight-up pop/rock collection on last year's House Party.
Released less than a year since that record, new collection Somnambulant Cycles is another masterful instrumental album that explores the notion of sleepwalking, while also aiming to create a sense of passive calm. "It is the quiet of night when our ancestors saw spirits over the water, but felt a strange comfort rather than fear," Keaton says of the album. "The strange sensation of being aware that you are sleepwalking, but not wanting to wake up. It is at times a moonlit field, at others a quiet warmly lit bedroom, a blue evening from up high, a nightbus home through the rain."
Made collaboratively, it's a fascinating and exquisite collection, mirroring the likes of Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm in the way it drifts through electronic, classical, and minimalism without ever binding itself to one of those specific references.
One of its most engaging moments comes via 'Like Chalk', a gently-exhilarating collab' with the London-based Japanese composer Hinako Omori, who has herself released some of our favourite experimental sounds of the past few years. A weightless four-minutes, 'Like Chalk' begins in shadowy quiet, the spacious keys and swirling ambience conjuring visions of early morning city streets, their secrets lost to the gloomy dusk that hides whatever it wants.
The track quietly builds through the introduction of gorgeous strings and an undercurrent of bubbling electronica that always threatens to smother the whole piece but eventually slinks back into the shadows. A beautiful marrying of worlds, it's an incredibly moving piece of music from a deft and often remarkable album, that I can't recommend highly enough.
Somnambulant Cycles is out now, you can buy it here
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