The Basement Demos - Matt McIntosh

Track list:

1. What It Means To Bleed
2. New England Rain
3. Graceless
4. Bless Your Heart
5. In This Town
6. They're Everywhere (interlude)
7. Lock & Key
8. World Stands Still

Running time: 23 minutes
Released: 2008

OK, so this is a completely random thing. I have no record of it, but I think someone pointed me at this on LastFM when it was all free, but it is free there no longer so... I have no idea why anyone would point me at this guy, his past work and band affiliations not being known to me or in a field that I ever followed. Still, I have them, so I must listen, that is how this works.

This is a home recording, raw not overproduced. Driving guitar and a gravelly hoarse voice that is breathy, reminding me of E from Eels. Keys join in, plinking away over the rhythm set up by the strumming. It all feels a little bit formulaic, pleasant enough but not arresting. I do like the raw nature of it but the composition and delivery fall a little flat. The second track feels like it goes on forever - a repeated pattern over a vocal that is barely more than a strained whisper. If there were a touch more variety in the instrumentation it would work pretty well, but alas it is just a little too empty for too long. By the time the variations arrive the song is too sullied to be fully redeemed.

McIntosh's vocal is pleasing - I am a bit of a sucker for a dark, broody delivery. Not screamed, not shouted, but contained anger, angst harnessed for effect. This presents me with a quandary, because I like the raw nature and the singing, but what I feel the songs need is... more production. Or at least more people involved. The slightly dull edge to everything works but there is not enough there for it to be effective, and I am not finding this predominantly one man and a guitar effort quite interesting enough.

Bless Your Heart has a bit more to it - keys and some other form of percussion - the overall sound goes in the right direction, keeping the rawness whilst growing in volume, but the song and performance unfortunately are less interesting. It also somehow runs into technical difficulties in WMP and is captured as another play of the opening track despite the fact I have not touched the playlist this time. Oh well. In This Town has a nice dirty, gritty air to its main guitar line, but suffers from a pretty dull arrangement. Overall this feels like a "nearly great" effort. There is something to like in every track here, but I am not finding anything to love. It does amuse me that the song tagged with (interlude) is longer than two of the other seven tracks though.

Did I say something to like about every track? That streak looks like it will broken by Lock & Key. I do not like the playing here, and the song is very dull for a minute and a half before it gets some tempo - the last minute does offer something more palatable but not enough to excuse an opening that was simply unpleasant. Generic as the hook sounds, World Stands Still is a much peppier end to the selection and this has some real charm to it before the abrupt end and fall of silence.

I am presented with a decision here. Each track did offer something of interest, but was it enough to keep? I think on balance probably not, and yet I am stayed by the fact that whilst I got all these tracks free, they are free no longer. Might I want to come back to this? I think on balance probably not for most of it - there is a little bit too much missing or out of place on each track to really say that I enjoyed this brief listen. It was pleasantly diverting but not gripping or compelling so I think I shall say "thanks, but no thanks" and trim.

The Barometric Sun - Deepspace

Track list:

1. Hymn 1 (Through the Barometric Sun)
2. The First Glimpse of the.....
4. Crysanthenum Ocean
5. In the Outer Reaches
7. Endless Glass Metropolis
10. Silence
11. Dream (The 49th Sheep)

Running time: 48 minutes
Released: 2007

A quick follow-up to The Barometric Sea, I can only guess that The Barometric Sun was meant as a companion piece, especially as it was within a year. I have 7 tracks from this disc. 5 are free right now, and 2 must have been in the past.

It has been a busy week, so I haven't got to many of these. Out Monday, guests Tuesday, unexpected co-op with a friend on Wednesday and my weekly Blood Bowl game on Friday. I did squeeze in a post on Thursday though. Today was a family birthday so it has been tough to find time to just sit and listen until now when I have that chance. It is late(ish) on a Saturday evening and I have just watched something about rebuilding a Spitfire - I am suitably relaxed.

The first impression generated by Hymn 1 is good. There is more body to this than some of the other Deepspace pieces I have on file and that is appreciated. It is still a soundscape, still inherently lonely, but the depth adds warmth to that so it is not so stark and distant as I felt some of The Barometric Sea was. Less ice floes, more beach or valley flooded with morning light. Some chimes kick in near the end that remind me of those of Big Ben which is an odd juxtaposition, and then we move on to a first glimpse of something. Here the artist proves that, like my younger self, one can be careless when typing an ellipsis. I swear I always used to end up with four periods, here he uses five. The track itself carries on the theme. It felt like a return to emptier sounds for a brief moment, then the additional embellishments showed up, including sampled (?) voice - choral singing by the sound of it. This definitely evokes Vangelis with the atmosphere created totally in line with the Blade Runner aesthetic. The song feels like it goes on forever, but it is actually shorter than the first track. I suspect that means that under the general appeal of the image it creates there is not too much to sustain affection. In any case, I am glad when we move on.

Crysanthenum Ocean - oops, looks like that is a typo in the title - feels like sci-fi videogame music from a downtime cutscene or, more likely, a front-end menu. It seems to fall into a cyclic pattern that fails to enthral. The warmer tone is still present but the ambience of this one is flat for me. What follows is more bombast than I would have expected, louder and stronger notes than have been stock-in-trade until now. This is a nice change, with the intricacies introduced in the fades, the lulls. I realise that I use "swells" a lot in writing - but perhaps I do genuinely see music as waves, building and crashing, rippling and calming. It feels truly appropriate here as there is the sense of a crescendo then a diminuendo on each tonic shift. It creates a really comforting sound space, an aural pocket of calm, a rhythmic effect of relaxation. I like this a lot, right up to the point where it seems to dead-end very suddenly. That ending was a shocker.

LastFM has b*****ed itself up again - it seems to do this if I remove a track from my library whilst it is in an active playlist - and thinks I am hearing Silence when actually it is Endless Glass Metropolis. Too bad, I was going to tag the title for its awesomeness. I would not want to live in a city of glass, but the image that generates is certainly one in keeping with the future/sci-fi ideal, supported by the sounds crafted here. I should really pass on these tracks to the gamers I know who love sci-fi RPGs, I think they would get far more atmospheric use of them than I would as I have never been particularly drawn to that genre (as a whole). Actually, I'll be fair on LastFM, looking more closely it seems to be picking up the problem from WMP giving bad information. You might have thought that the player would load the info of the track when the track starts, not somehow manage to display the info for another track altogether because it pre-loaded it then somehow skipped in the playlist. Actually I would have thought that, until I started working in software design by accident and optimisation (and some methods to achieve it) became a relevant concern. Still, it is an error.

Silence is not, well, silent. It is certainly emptier than the other tracks thus far but even then it contains some pretty bold notes. It feels slower rather than colder or less involving, no obvious rise-fall-rise-fall wave pattern here - more a sense of pulses through empty space. There are background transitions and a reverb effect that underlies most of the piece but they fade and merge together. We wake up from Silence and enter into a Dream. It does not immediately strike me as dream-like or particularly relevant to sleep though after a while it does pick up that sort of fuzzy, intangible quality that is alike the soft focus effect often used visually to depict dreams on screen. It also breaks down as a theme a bit by the halfway mark and feels like a different piece to the one I was listening to a moment ago. I do not really care for the switch initially either, but it pulls around. The second half of the piece then rushes by in a sense of swirls and twirls, to the point that when it ends I am abruptly catapulted out of whatever semi-conscious state my mind had fallen into.

Overall, I think this was better than The Barometric Sea, but less good than Another Empty Galaxy; I like the warmer sounds and appreciated the visuals my brain supplied on hearing it more than the cooler, isolation-based ones that accompanied the last post. I would not say Deepspace is genius, but he has something in these pieces alright that can really make for surprisingly engaging experience.

The Barometric Sea - Deepspace

Track list:

1. Energy Failure On The Sibelius
2. The Astrology
3. Sol
4. The Barometric Sea
5. Leaving The Hub
7. The Drop Of Nowhere
8. Euphandemonium
11. Map Of The Pleiades

Running time: 55 minutes
Released: 2007

A return to Deepspace, whose ambient track Another Empty Galaxy I rather enjoyed. This time it is more free tracks from a different album. Not an entire free disc this time, but most of one. I had 5 tracks already, 3 more were free which I have just grabbed, and a final 3 were not. I can guess this will be more ambient material but not at its themes.

Immediate electrics hum and give a deliberate (I would guess) sense of being underwater through an intangible oscillating quality that seems to slow everything down. It is quite an oppressive piece, atmospherically speaking and veers into discord in places. Energy Failure on the Sibelius is not winning me over, but I could see it being decent mood music for a deep-sea or deep-space adventure. There is a part of me that thinks I should be assigning tunes like this some metadata, or maybe just to a playlist, to take advantage of  actually listening and building a picture of them because thematic background music is a plus in at least one of my hobbies. I have to say though, I think I will stick with simply deleting it this time.

The Astrology is the first of the longer pieces (there are three around 10 minutes each), and it starts more promisingly but then fails to build on that. A haunting tone is all well and good but it does not play with it enough to create lasting interest. I got really into Another Empty Galaxy but somehow I am not feeling the same draw here. I don't know if the cold outside seeps in a bit with these vast empty sounds - this tune reminds me more of icy wastes than any other kind of land- (or sea-)scape. And as I commit that, something else is added to make it feel a little less empty. A mechanical kind of chugging bass loop. Maybe a caravan of some sort, slogging across the floes. Repetitive as it is, this loop really adds depth to the track and lifts is enough to make it work.

As it ends, I have a moment where everything is borked - I'm listening to one track but it is reporting and recording another; I do not know whether I am coming or going. So I sort it out by deleting the album and re-downloading everything except Sibelius and sort it out, listening to the end of The Astrology again as a result, but that's an acceptable enough price. Only the LastFM scrobbler does it again as Sol starts, recording it as The Astrology again. Some odd things have been happening recently; most Mawkin:Causley tracks were scrobbled twice during that listen a couple of weeks back. I'll put that aside though and go by the on-screen in WMP. Sol then. It is vaguely reminiscent of Vangelis in some respects and I approve.

Yup, every track now seems to be scrobbling as the one before it. Oh well. This is a lonely pursuit at the best of times, albeit one that through its engagement wards of loneliness, but tracks like this really emphasise the feeling. I can see this as being stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, looking out over vast swathes of nothingness, a big empty sky above and no landmarks to guide. Bleak, that's the word. And yet there is a warmth of sorts to the music itself that undermines that sense, even as it creates it. Since the opening track, I have fallen in to rather enjoying this again. It does help that I can see other uses for it but there is enough here to be oddly fulfilling in its own right. Leaving the hub is suitably dark, trepidatious mood to it, that you could see it as a fearful step into the unknown. It reminds me a little of prog rock, with long-held chords transitioning from one to another, but this is stripped back not embellished so the comparison quickly falls down.

The tracks have definitely gone a little darker to my ear; The Drop of Nowhere is less interesting as a result. Perhaps my attention has wandered a little, but this track is more of a drone with not enough to lift it or provide gems that sparkle against the black backdrop. Euphandemonium (great title!) lifts things a bit, which is welcome, but only brief. The strains that gave it the lift fade fairly quickly then linger there just in the background a bit in a way that makes the track really not work for me. Then it is over, for this is a short song, and we are on to the final piece, the "bonus track" - this is also shorter and has more obvious instrumentation rather than the strict ambience of prior tracks. The sustained chord is a little wearing though and this will be joining a few of its disc-mates in my recycle bin. For the second time tonight, too!

All in all this was a hit and miss set of tracks with the middle better than either end. Another selection of Deepspace's freely available work, The Barometric Sun is next, unless I fiddle with the order.