Bright Raven
Blackpoold

Boredom, anxiety, painkillers and frustration make a heady mix for both reflection and action. For three weeks I stared out of the window of the tower block onto the tall brick towers of the old asylum chimneys. The past was a strange land suddenly out of reach, the present confusing and claustrophobic, the future something I could only visualise and idolise. From the balmy Autumn day of my release a light was switched on, buzzing urgently like a neon street lamp on my path. Life took on new vigour and meaning. Pleasures starkly illuminated, annoyances inconsequential. Old work was re-examined and appreciated. Machines treasured and connected. My basement filled with ever greater warmth and excitement. The toy towns of our inner minds are constructed of a million tiny building blocks of experience.There’s a freedom that comes from realising what might have been. Peace in reflection, and I take pleasure in the hum drum. Unhampered by trends, untethered to a scene, stripped back to essential carnal influences and desires.Who are we but the sum of our experience. ‘Everything Is Quite Now’ meanders through a reimagined landscape of personal history, releasing musical fragments to drift among soaring treetops, hollowed lakes and labyrinthine concrete structures, liberated from genre and form – alive at last. In these great expanses, light and dark are presented not as polar opposites, but as a limitless, unified whole. References to EBM and industrial techno manifest within the sporadic percussive framework whilst gauzy ambient backdrops form an entire world of their own, constructed from the gentle hiss of a looping tape, the booming caverns of a muffled kick, the vivid distortions of a crystalline synth. In the depths of a misty forest, warmth permeates, absorbing inside it all of the darkness, pain, romance and beauty from before.

Sticking to the format of 4 superlative cuts from equally talented producers, the quality remains unquestionably consistent on Volume 8 of his various artist series.