Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

Clem Leek: Holly Lane
Hibernate

As its allusive title suggests, Holly Lane is evocative in the extreme. The forty-three-minute album debut from British composer and Schedios label head Clem Leek (whose EPs previously appeared on Experimedia and Dead Pilot) traffics in a refined electronic-ambient style that's not unlike Helios, though Leek distances himself from other electronic artists by including atmospheric enhancements to a greater degree. In this instance, said enhancements are of the distinctly brooding type, a move that gives Leek's music an added gravitas. The release presents eight elegiac set-pieces of sculpted electro-acoustic sound, with much of it wrapped in a blanket of synthetic fog and accented with field recordings (such as burbling water in “At the Mercy of the Waves”). During the album, the gentle murmur of a choir drifts alongside a blurry swirl of pianos and guitars (“Smugglers Top”), and keening string tones resonate within a thick, shuddering haze (“Mistletoe Lane”).

After springing to life with the sing-song chimes of a grandfather clock, “Mystery Moor” develops its haunted character patiently, using a funereal tick-tock rhythm as an anchor for the synthetic tones and willowy atmospheres surging over it. The title track drapes elegant swathes of long string figures over a rippling base of vinyl crackle and near-subliminal rumbling, while ghostly voices and decomposing piano chords echo throughout the long-abondoned chambers of “Greylings Manor.” Holly Lane's most moving piece comes at album's end when mournful string melodies rise from the smoldering ruins of “The Burnt Home” in a track that wouldn't sound out of place on a Max Richter recording. Song titles like “Greylings Manor” and “Cliff Castle” help strengthen the material's oft-musty character, and the note adorning the package itself—“Through the cold air and fog I reached Holly Lane. My journey had just begun”—likewise adds to this fine album's mystique.

December 2010