Rosales: Woven Songs
Polar Seas Recordings / Home Normal
In hindsight, it seems inevitable that Ian Hawgood and Brad Deschamps would partner, not only as musical collaborators but as label managers fashioning an optimal distribution strategy for their release. Operating under the Rosales alias, the two are jointly issuing Woven Songs on their respective Home Normal and Polar Seas Recordings imprints, with Deschamps (Toronto, Ontario) and Hawgood (Brighton, England) recommending the LP be purchased on a particular side of the Atlantic to lessen cost. It's available naturally in a digital format too.
Woven Songs follows the Rosales' Archives-issued Still, Tomorrow, but the new one was actually written and recorded between 2019 and 2020 and thus prior to that debut album—not that that detail makes a huge amount of difference when their sounds align so seamlessly. The new one presents eight tracks that collectively register as a long-form suite more than as separate pieces. With guitar and synth loops as building blocks and processing applied using Space Echo and other means, the material is classic ambient soundscaping of the kind the two have been refining for years.
Nuanced, artful, and fluid, Woven Songs begins with the neon-lit glimmer of “Woven,” its hush, undulations, and enveloping textures so potent the listener's immediately drawn into the album's world. “Arcs” perpetuates the serenading tone, after which “Elm” slowly blossoms, its murmuring drone accented by a haunting melodic figure. Whereas peaceful guitar patterns move to the fore for “Hold,” “Loom” hovers serenely in place, with guitar intoning faintly in the distance and with a hint of nocturnal insect thrum punctuating the sound mass.
On the second side, Woven Songs works through the plaintive susurrations of “Silo” before arriving at the penultimate “Matter,” a nine-minute conglomeration of shimmering organ chords, guitar textures, and synth haze, and the gentle curtain-closer “Last.” The obvious care the two brought to this musical production is mirrored in the beauty of the artwork Laura Kay Keeling created for it. The imagery of Japanese house plants is a fitting match for the musical material, even if there's no specific, one-to-one correspondence between the visual and musical dimensions of the release.February 2022