Articles
Spotlight 15
Favourite Labels 2014

Albums
Poppy Ackroyd + Lumen
Avec le soleil sortant ...
Balmorhea
Brooklyn Rider
bvdub
Cern
Del Sol String Quartet
Nick Gill
Stefan Goldmann
Hammock
Chihei Hatakeyama
Robert Honstein
Jonas Kopp
David Lackner
Last Ex
Neil Leonard
Little Phrase
The Mark Lomax Trio
LA Percussion Quartet
Manual
Near The Parenthesis
Newman and Cox
Nuage
Pan & Me
Bobby Previte
Marc Sabat
Hein Schoer
Wadada Leo Smith
SPC ECO
Subotika
Tape
Templeton + Armstrong
Ken Thomson
Ulterior Motive
Joris Voorn
Andrew Weathers
Ezra Weiss Sextet
Stefan Wesolowski
Keith Worthy

Compilations / Mixes
Aphelion
EPM Selected Vol. 3
Universal Quantifier

EPs / Cassettes / Mini-Albums / Singles
Balmorhea
Blu Mar Ten
Michael Jon Fink
Oceanic Triangulation
Northumbria and Famine
Total Science
Simon Whetham

Andrew Weathers: One Day We'll Find The Valley
Lifelike Family

Recorded at various locations in Oakland, California and at the Weathers home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in summer and autumn of 2013, One Day We'll Find The Valley finds restless sound explorer Andrew Weathers presenting highly personalized—idiosyncratic, even—interpretations of songs from the Sacred Harp hymnbook. The six settings, each dramatically different in kind, unite various strands within Weathers' music-making practice. His connection to the folk music tradition is well-accounted for but so too is his interest in bold electronic treatments and adventurous experimental manipulation.

Though the album title hints at a gospel dimension, its track titles show that its thirty-six minutes focus on issues of spirituality (the titular valley, of course, alludes to life after death—“a reward for a life lived well,” in Weathers' own words). It's very much a solo recording, with Weathers credited with guitars (electric and acoustic), electronics, samples, synthesizers, and voice, though voice contributions also come from John Weathers and Janie Benson.

One Day We'll Find The Valley is admittedly somewhat of a curio in the way Weathers twists each song into unusual form. As an example, “We Will Sing With Angels There” opens the album with the slowly rising sounds of a church choir, its members' swaying voices swelling in unison with all the kind of impassioned fervour one would expect. But Weathers manipulates the material into a blurry mass that sounds at times like it's located underwater, a move pushed to an even more radical extreme during the collage-styled meditation “There Will Be No Sorrow There.” “Sing to Me of Heaven” eschews vocals for a slow-burning, funereal drone heavy on electric guitar shadings and synthesizer flutter, while the electronic-folk piece “Save, Lord, or We Perish” sees Weathers indulging his interest in both bluesy fingerpicking and Eastern dronescaping. All of the pieces are modest in length except for the closer “We'll Meet Beyond the Grave,” a droning phantasmagoria of hyperactive synthesizer patterns and murmuring speaking voices that unspools across twelve trippy minutes.

November 2014