Forest Fire/Sleeping States
Friday, August 21. 2009
Artist: Sleeping States
Album: In the Gardens of the North
Label: Bella Union
Forest Fire review up over there (La Blogotheque gave this album of the year, Rough Trade album of the week. I must confess to feeling slightly bemused by it. OK, but a bit of a mess, generally); Sleeping States review over there too, and below.
The now mostly ignored English novelist Henry Green once described his writing style as like a ‘long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears’. All of which might be a good way to describe Markland Starkie’s vaulting ambition as Sleeping States where he seems to indulge an older literary sensibility and times a near abstract painterly tug at the emotions.
Opening an album with songs dedicated to WG Sebald and Kafka – ‘Rings of Saturn’ and ‘The Next Village’ – is something of a statement of intent; and as such In the Gardens of the North is overlain with a kind of weary melancholia; and though on the surface it appears to be about the potential of movement and discovery in reality it is about immersion: in perception and environment. It’s difficult and broadly speaking, very original. I suspect it’ll get a good deal of critical acclaim and also get largely ignored. Which is a shame as it’s a record that deserves to be heard.
Starkie’s sound is a difficult one to describe. At heart it comes from a pastoral folk tradition but it has elements of the baroque to it; he also possesses a classic pop sensibility. So: a kind of dowdier Sufjan perhaps? But whereas Starkie, who is originally from London, explored a kind of idealised pastoralism in his earlier work (These Open Spaces, the previous album, released in 2007, is certainly an escapist’s tract) In the Gardens of the North is very much a product of its environment. Starkie went as far as to record it in a shack in the woods around Bristol. And as much as the flat expanses of Suffolk infected Sebald’s prose, so has the sylvan nature of the writing and recording process of …Gardens had a major influence on the sound and texture of the end product. At times, such is the mix between recording and environment, it’s almost as if it isn’t there at all. It’s a peculiar sensation. Then a figure will present itself – a simple brushed drum or one of Starkie’s signature guitar lines (such as on ‘Breathing Space’) – and the whole sound will come into focus. And in some respects the record is like a landscape: not necessarily sensed as such, but, like Green’s slow appeal, absorbed unconsciously.
The other thing the immersion in environment seems to have done to the Sleeping States sound is give it an undercurrent of menace. ‘On the Beach at Aldeburgh’ (another nod to Sebald, not to mention Brian Eno who mythologised this part of the Suffolk Coast on Ambient 4: On Land) has a Tortoise-like lurch to it, the off key guitars and muted violins like wind in the offshore buoys; ‘Showers in the Summer’, before it resolves itself into a wide-sky hymnal, is, with its bed of arpeggiated guitars, a stumble through bracken-choked woods.
All this and I feel as if I’ve barely touched the surface of things, or mentioned Starkie’s odd haunting voice – in its naked state somewhere between a less histrionic Fyfe Dangerfield and Jeff Buckley, otherwise layered and doubled into something entirely Other. In the Gardens of the North is ultimately a dense, introspective record that follows no logic except its own internal quest for resolution. Heavy with literary allusion it gives the impression of needing time to absorb and decode. Here’s hoping people take the time to give it the attention it deserves.
Download: Sleeping States - Showers In The Summer
Download: Forest Fire - Slow Motion
