Colin Andrew Sheffield: For Tomorrow
Bee Eater Recordings

Colin Andrew Sheffield's For Tomorrow is designed to be a companion piece to “For Today,” which appears on the superb Elevator Bath compilation Cleansing Ascension. The new work, presented in a three-inch format and available in a 100-copy run, takes little time getting started. Like a machine engine being turned on, the twenty-minute piece instantly flickers into life and then maintains a regulated intensity for the duration. Sheffield builds up a dense and slightly blurry wall of sound that's not so blurry that wave-like surges of string tones and the like can't be glimpsed at its center. The effect is simultaneously turbulent and calming, with the relentless momentum of the mass offset by the slow unfurl heard within. Twelve minutes in, the cloud mass slowly slips from view, leaving rapidly flickering tones in its wake until they too gradually decompress. Dream-like swirls dominate thereafter until they ultimately bring For Tomorrow to an end that's clearly different in tone to the industrial charge that characterizes the piece's beginning.

May 2010