Alistair Crosbie — Music For Shipwreacks

‘Music for shipwrecks’ offers up  four tracks of glowing, drifting, grand & harmonic laced ambience & drone works. This is the third work in ‘music for’ series from Scottish born mood setter Alistair Crosbie; the other two volumes in the series are 'Musicfordrowning' (Lefthand Pressings, 2006) and 'Musicforlighthouses' (Quinquaginta, 2007).

The four tracks on offer here last between nearly twenty minutes & just shy of four minutes a piece, and each track nicely gives a drifting & slowly developing feeling of grandeur & harmonic richness as if your slowly drifting over the fallen ornate & majestic wonder of a once powerful & seemingly unsinkable ship. With banks of multicolour fish weave in & out of the structure, and sunlight ever-so often catchingf the fallen grandeur of the wreck, yet there’s also the odd hint of dark more murky drone undercurrents too suggesting the dark more sinister feel of shipwrecks.  Crosbie seems to be using a fairly simplistic, but never the less effective series of pulled-out  synthesizer tones &  guitar elements which he aptly manipulates into the tracks grand harmonic yet often watery drifting feel.

You can hear traces of Eno, as well as a few other ambient artists work through-out ‘Music For Shipwrecks’, yet Crosbie adds enough of his own sonic flavour & dramatic ambient flare to make this more than just a simply rehash of ambient clichés.