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That obscure (deliberately
obscuring?) band name conceals three fine musicians from the indigenous
English scene - Chris Wood, Robert Harbron and John Dipper, all hitherto
familiar in other contexts and artistic permutations - who have teamed
up for 'Ghosts', a CD presenting "a music in which the roles of the composer,
arranger and performer are united, where timeless traditional repertoire
and contemporary composition rub shoulders." On just under half of the
tracks, this means taking traditional sources/old manuscripts as a springboard
for intelligent rearrangement and reworking - the thesis being (to quote
from the insert note) that "as the musician plays, standing behind them
is the ghost of the player they learnt the music from.
Standing behind that ghost is the ghost of the player they learnt from,
and so on, back to the beginning of music." The performances and arrangements
here quite intentionally tread the avowedly thin line between over-cleverness
and slavish, boring re-creation, then, in a spirit of genuinely imaginative
exploration of musical possibilities, and the end result is credible,
and highly invigorating, music-making. Given the available instrumental
palette (violin, concertina/bassoon and either second violin, viola or
guitar), it's little wonder that textures tend towards the darkly rarefied,
refined chamber-kind, with a decidedly understated ambience. This can
sometimes seem a mite under whelming, even dour, on first encounter, but
the high quality of the musicianship invariably wins through to produce
a uniquely potent redefinition of English music, characterised by an austere
beauty that repays careful listening, even (perhaps against expectations)
on the more energetic tunes (where I often detect a definite creative
cross-influence from Scandinavian musics). Much of the CD is strangely
hypnotic - the curious closing Ruskin Mill Waltz (a student composition
by John, it turns out) a bit in the manner of a Third Ear Band artefact,
I thought. Indeed, a small majority the CD's eleven tracks are non-traditionally-derived
new compositions by EAC members - two of these (Bleary Winter and Mari
Lwyd, both with words by Hugh Lupton) feature Chris's distinctive singing
voice (which also graces a gnomically expressive reinterpretation of The
Colour Of Amber, a song originally learnt from Mary Anne Haynes). This
is a deceptively low-key yet compelling CD, in fact, which is certainly
worth your spending the time getting to know.
David Kidman
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