The Scottish multi-instrumentalist and composer returns with a new selection of soothing, meditative mix of experimental classical and jazz, but this time joined with six different singers represented by the birds on the album artwork created by Clay Pipe Music’s Frances Castle. Wasylyk created the music formed in his home town of Dundee with a musical palette including brass and woodwind, a six-piece string section, guitar, bass, drums, vibraphone, Mellotron, Fender Rhodes, tape loops, synthesisers and percussion with the strings arranged by the cellist and long-term collaborator Pete Harvey. The vocalists then received their respective music, and mostly also creating their own lyrics, recorded their parts remotely, and then, like migrating birds, returned them back to him in Scotland. It’s an intriguing project of haunting beauty, with the vocalised tracks predominantly the highlights. This includes on the artwork the cuckoo, a nod to Belle and Sebastian’s 2004 single I’m A Cuckoo, with that band’s Stuart Murdoch distinctive voice on opener Private Symphony #2, a song about creating music itself, Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals on The Cold Collar, Saya Ueno from Japan’s Tenniscoats on Hachi No Su, Peter Brewis from Field Music on In Portmanteau, Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever with Cloth’s Molly Linen, a song filled with bright trumpets and inspired by the writing of Derek Jarman, and Spectators In The Absence of God with the extraordinary beautiful ghostly fragility of another fellow Scot Kathryn Joseph. These six are the songs that really take flight, but the title track, with Wasylyk’s voice unusually taking a lead, is oddly but intriguing deep thanks apparently to a throat infection and a touch of pitch-shifting, First Moons of Adulthood is a soothing, whispery, cinematic blend of piano, brass, woodwind and guitars, while the closer Soul Enters The Ocean Sun Climbs Out Of The Sea, all on piano and strings, offers a sense of circularity, resolution and ascension. Stirring, powerful, evocative, transportive, beautiful. Out on Clay Pipe Music.
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