Shedding - What God doesn't Bless,You wont love;what you don [Home Tapes - 2006]What God doesn’t Bless,…. finds Sound sculpturer Connor Bell recontextualizing and morphing the work of jazz musician Eric Dolphy, to make a strange droning triped-out hallucinogenic audio soup. That falls somewhere between ambience, jazz, psychedelic rhythmic led freak outs and lost in strange nursery rythem woodiness. In the interesting Inlay notes Connor talks about reading Dolphy's biography where he mentions that he often liked to play along with and try and make the sounds of birds from outside his practice space, this was Connors starting point for this three piece suite. He bends and folds, reverse and stretches Dolphy's saxophone, flute and bass clarinet playing into haunted & drifting audio, adding in bird song and other strange sound particles into the mix. Most of the time it remains rhythm-less and oddly drifting but on the second track percussive tripped -out rhythm lock is added curtesy of Joey Yates. The whole album very much ties in with excellent bizzare children’s/ Fantasy painted cover artwork. One often feels like your drifting into the strange crawls of the large eyed creature on the cover, travelling though wispy clouds of mysteries reed harmonics, or darky shadowy claims of forestall overhang.In places it bring to mind some of Evan Parkers more laid back and psychedelic work, in particle some of the stranger stuff he did with Basil Kirchin on albums like Quatum. A satisfying & mostly dreamy emersion in strange harmonics and drifting sound painting, that one can easily loses ones self in. Music to drift off into strange uncharted depths of ones imagination. Roger Batty
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