Ned Milligan: Afternoon Hours
Fluid Audio

An adventurous musical explorer when not fulfilling his professional duties as an elementary school teacher, Ned Milligan now makes an appearance on Fluid Audio after issuing previous material on his own Florabelle label. The move serves him well, as Fluid Audio treats Milligan's project to its customary high standard of care. Issued as the first installment in the label's Notebook Edition series, Afternoon Hours is a delight for the eyes and ears. Snugly housed within a miniature envelope is a booklet containing thirteen vintage prints, twelve of them glued onto the right-side pages and displaying entomological illustrations of butterflies and other insects; the album title and artist name (the only text included) appear on the opening page, and two three-inch CDs are tucked inside the booklet within separate sleeves, their six tracks equivalent to the sides of a standard vinyl album. Enhancing the overall impression is the booklet's cover, whose abstract array suggests the influence of traditional Kimono-related design. (Note that four cover variations and envelope sleeves of related colour were prepared for the physical edition.)

Musically, Afternoon Hours picks up where Milligan's previous release, Nature Always Needs Improving, left off, with wind chimes again a central sound source. Having recorded the chimes to cassette using the built-in microphone on an old tape recorder borrowed from school, he began to notice tape-related imperfections seeping into the music, the kinds of woozy distortion familiar to long-time cassette devotees. Up first, “Neighborly” instantiates the project's musical character in smearing the peaceful interactions of outdoor chimes with ambient hiss and bird chirps. If the opener is an example of audio vérité, generally speaking, the subsequent piece, “Drive Time Radio,” reflects the imposition of Milligan's shaping hand in its heavily processed design and softly hiccupping flow, even if, as we're told, an unedited excerpt of a live performance inhabits the track's center. The project's musical design opens up during “August Perrenials” and “Hollowed Stone” when chimes and willowy tones are accompanied by sounds of rain drizzle, thunder, and the insistent ringing of (what sounds like) a bicycle bell. Representative settings such as “Harrumph” and “Days After Days” never adhere to a regulated rhythm design, but the tinkling in both cases nonetheless adds a gamelan dimension to the project.

July 2018