(2021) VA – Drifts & Flurries: A Second Language Collectanea    


Review:
For the last decade or so London-based indie Second Language has been home to a whole host of artists who don’t quite fit into the usual codified genres, a haven for makers of strange and beautiful sounds, encompassing (but not defined by) hauntology, chamber pop, spectral folk, neo-classical and electronica. The label’s artists are often linked by little except their willingness to experiment, but the sense of collaboration is strong and frequent crossovers occur. One such meeting of minds began in 2014 as Silver Servants. They released one album and planned another, which was never fully realised. Now the structure of that unformed album has been reimagined. What emerges is a sonically varied but thematically coherent album about winter. It is not a Silver Servants album as such: the old members of that collective (including Katie English, Oliver Cherer and Glen Johnson) do appear, but they are joined by a number of new faces, blurring the lines between compilation and collaboration. The overall sound is as all-enveloping as a blizzard and often as intricate as a single snowflake. The two tracks credited to Silver Servants form two parts of a slowly unfolding epic called A Midwinter Litany. The first part begins with an almost Christmassy twinkle, and indeed the lyrics have a hint of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas In Wales about them. It deals with the tangible, delectable fear of the strange and the unknown – personified by a bearded hermit in a barn. Halfway through it breaks down into a wild, frosty, droning instrumental section, as if the point of view has suddenly switched to that of the weird and perhaps mad old man. The second part, which appears on the back end of the album, is more abstract: a constantly shifting instrumental with hints of Japanese ambient and even minimal techno. Other highlights include Oliver Cherer’s solo offering, a wonderfully evocative cover of Nico’s Frozen Warnings. It’s less abrasive than the original but the icy beauty and ambiguous sense of threat remains. Cherer’s duo with Robin Saville, ISAN, contribute Winter, Wraiths Skating, a blinking, dreamlike electronic piece that sounds like library music from a frozen planet. A similar shimmer comes off David Rothon’s Bryn Glas, where a swoop of pedal steel cuts a swathe across the monochrome landscape. Alter Later’s Winter Kills, featuring Mücha, sounds like a stripped-back version of Portishead’s more intimate moments – a minimal piano line, claustrophobic production and background whisperings combine with a reserved vocal performance that promises and then withholds a wealth of emotion. The effect is stunning. Equally impressive is Yumi Mashiki’s Applecross, a fluid piano composition that possesses an uncanny, haunted beauty, and the pulsing sonic experiments of Marc Namblard, whose work is based around field recordings from his native France. The Frosted Pane, a sixteen-minute bonus track featuring Glen Johnson (Piano Magic, Textile Ranch) and violist Raisa Zapyranova, is the icing on the cake. It is unapologetically experimental, full of expressive flights of fancy and textural changes that are both subtle and glacial. It is the type of music that toys with scale and perception; it could represent the widest and emptiest of open spaces or the most complex and infinitesimal patterns. The same could be said for the whole album, which at every turn is ambitious and surprising, always in tune with the wintry landscape but also with the interior landscapes of the human mind, which can be just as cold and just as beautiful. — folkradio.co.uk





Track Listing:
1. Ghostwriter - Winter, Remind Us (I) (01:02)
2. Silver Servants - A Midwinter Litany (I) (07:34)
3. The Declining Winter - Misty Bridges (Statues In Fog Mix) (04:05)
4. Sea Glass - Blank Like Snow (03:52)
5. Ghostwriter - Winter, Remind Us (II) (01:02)
6. D.Rothon - Bryn Glas (03:15)
7. Alter Later - Winter Kills (04:41)
8. Marc Namblard - Pierre-Percée (01:40)
9. Yumi Mashiki - Applecross (02:20)
10. Isan - Winter, Wraiths Skating (04:33)
11. Oliver Cherer - Frozen Warnings (04:39)
12. P60 - A Secular Dance (04:40)
13. Silver Servants - A Midwinter Litany (II) (05:28 )
14. Ghostwriter - Winter, Remind Us (III) (01:04)
15. Glen Johnson - The Frosted Pane (Bonus track) (16:23)


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient, chamber pop
Country: V/A
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits