mothlite: the flax of reverie

where to start? well not at the picture with the flat cap and whippet that makes them look like a pete and dud sketch.  well actually maybe.  there is something quintessentially english about mothlite.  english like peter cook.  or lewis carroll.  or pink floyd.

the website says:

with one eye reflecting the dark of the underground and the other the colours of day, mothlite bears this loss downstream: beneath crooked trees where wild eyes watch unseen; across open fields where we frolic beneath the stars and smoke curls from metal mouths; through thirsty gullies where stones chatter and falcons cry, before, finally, releasing us into the enormity of the ocean.

it’s this link with nature and the nods to henry williamson and stan brakhage (titularly and musically) that form the wyrd heart of the record, giving the sounds a cinematic and bookish feel.

mixing the visual music, twigs and insects cinema of brakhage’s mothlight and arvo part’s hypnotic dissonance and the coltrane-y jazz (alice and john) and guapo’s psycheprog, it’s a testament to the disquieting uber-talent of both daniel o’sullivan and antti uusimaki that not only is this record not a sprawling mess but a work of rich dark alchemy.  an earstroking synthesis of organic instrumentation and studio wizardry.  if you’re brain sparks listening to the layering and textures and manipulations of talk talk’s spirit of eden or the nocturnal orchestrations of ulver’s shadow of the sun then you’ll likely dig this too.

the flax of reverie is not a million miles away from o’sullivan’s work with guapo and miasma, thematically or sonically.  a collection of disparate elements; movement and stillness, light and dark, brooding and exuberant, that glue together to form an unsettlingly tranquil fifty minutes of mad madrigalian forest folk swirling with sensuous shadows and dark delirium.  damned alliteration.

the untouched dew crams a whole records worth of ideas and sounds and choreography into eleven minutes. saxaphone, keys, strings and choirs, the actual bloody ocean all swirling and weaving and aurally seducing me to a gibbering moist wreck.

cheers fella’s!

the one in the water 

mothlight:

mothlite:

mothspace / mothlite / southern