In the Lakes District of northern England, where Russ Young calls home, the storied history of Romantic poetry is almost as sedimented as the literal ground that tourists now flock to in the hopes of resuscitating the nature that inspired Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their ilk.
Strange how a place can become an actual site of unfettered projection when it comes to the slippery nature of language, poetic or otherwise. Were the Romantic poets the first field recorders, anticipating the mode of capturing some semblance of a place's essence through passive documentation, before the technology for such endeavours existed? I say all of this because the confluence of source material, physical nature, and composition is very much at stake for Young on his lush but languid release, Cloak.
Over seven tracks, Young places us in a relationship to his environment that is simultaneously abstract and concrete. Far from a poetic meditation, the recordings that provide the foundational structure of Cloak are reanimated with what feels like the same air, water, and land that first brought them into being. As far as ambience goes, Young is not reinventing the wheel here, but the embeddedness of his compositions suggests a kind of assiduity to the tried and true methods of electronic composition that leave the question of newness or innovation stumbling over itself, wanting, as it should be. To listen to Cloak is to be submerged in its warmth and lissom waves of slow development, out of time because it is so close to the essential nature of the time of the recorded medium itself. This is the great achievement of Cloak: to bring us so close to a place and an environment that we can actually hear the technical apparatuses themselves. To abuse the Romantic allusion again, Wordsworth wrote in his Prelude that he found that "the sky was not a sky". For Young, nature is not nature if it moves through the recorded medium. Or, maybe it is only nature, and nothing else.
Cloak is for fans of warm, ambient compositions, which require a lot of attention, or no attention at all. Highly recommended!
