Visionary Hours: Footfalls Echo
Preserved Sound

Originally issued in early 2015 on Hibernate and now re-issued on Preserved Sound, Footfalls Echo achieves its sense of unity in an unusual way. Typically, a core group of musicians performs an album's tracks; by contrast, most of the eight settings on Visionary Hours' recording treat singular acoustic instruments as their focal points, with a different musician often responsible for the instrument sounds produced. It's from the way in which those instruments have been manipulated that Footfalls Echo's sense of unity is achieved: Preserved Sound showrunner Hayden Berry (aka Visionary Hours) and Richard Formby used tape delay generated through a Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder to reverse and/or slow down the recordings of the acoustic instruments.

Indicative of the approach is the opening piece, “The Stillness of the Violin,” in which the melodic patterns voiced by Dorota Blaszczynska are blurred, multiplied, and generally reshaped into slow-motion undulations. As haunting is “Reaches Into Silence,” though this time it's Teresa Lipinski's flute that's subjected to Berry and Formby's treatments; here the manipulations are pushed to an even greater extreme, given that the clearly defined flute lines with which the piece begins eventually swell into an opaque, flickering cloud formation. Berry is not only a sound manipulator on the project but an instrumentalist, too, as shown by the dream-like entities he births on “Neither From nor Towards” and “In a World of Speculation” using organ and guitars (acoustic and electric). Interestingly, the music on Footfalls Echo is never more stirring than when it deviates from its single-instrument focus with an arrangement for flute, violin, and organ on its resplendent closing track, “Which is Always Present.”

September 2016