Musique Machine / Multi-Genre Music Magazine

As early as, well, forever, music, like language, has been subjected to the will of the forces of narration, regardless of the specific context or media-determined instruments employed to see it through. Narrating, it would seem, comes easily to music – like film and language – its form ineluctably geared toward duration, time elapsing in the process of listening, recording, mixing, or just plain making. You cannot “hear” a piece of music without it playing, over time, more than you can see a film without seeing it unfold, frame by frame, shot by shot. Or can you? I have no idea whether Simon Kirby feels the paranoia of narration the way other composers of electronic music did and still do, but his first solo album, which follows many years of sound production, installation, and related endeavors, moves within the orbit of the narratable. There is a journey, movement through space punctuated by time, and the ex-machinations of field-recorded voices, putting us in either the imagined community of common speakers, or somewhere else.

Spread across two long compositions, At Rahoy, the Early Light, is deeply personal, the titular reference is to the ur-scene of Kirby’s childhood on the west coast of Scotland. The transitory, or transitional, is closer to the discrete operations of Kirby’s source material and synthesizer, than anything as arbitrary as a name. And perhaps that’s the rub: the drift of Kirby’s ambient washes brings us closer to the drift itself, there is no final destination, except the one that closes each side of a record. The proof of this, for lack of a better term, is offered when we learn that the first composition, “Leaving Oyama Shrine”, is the result of a live performance, while the second, is not. There is little in the sonic footprint to give such clues away, and masking the compositions’ situatedness in either the studio or live context is a subtle nod to the inherent arbitrariness of place as such. Maybe ambivalence is better than arbitrary, because place is no doubt at the heart of At Rahoy, the Early Light, but it moves, can’t ever make up its mind where it is or how it should signify its specificity to the rest of us, who are only capable of aural transport.