Album: Blue Grey
Artist: Purple Crow
Label: Self-released
Catalogue no: N/A
Tracklist:
1. Blue
Grey
2. Pipe
3. Flowing
4. Blue
Grey (Radio edit)
5. Pipe
(Radio Edit)
6. Flowing
(Radio edit)
You know you’re onto
something when the first track (‘Blue Grey’) by this Canadian project opens
with a shimmering plane of ebbing and flowing ringing tones that swing in from
nowhere, hovers somewhere between your ears, and has the effect of transporting
you outside yourself. You find yourself floating somewhere in the timeless
interstitial spaces between being/non-being, knowing/not knowing, active/static.
It’s a place where all states exist, and simultaneously where nothing happens.
Here is where you swim, insensate and yet aware, existing in a condition of
euphoria and beatitude, borne along by unfelt currents. All conditions pertain
here: not only is there the feeling of bliss but it’s chased by an undercurrent
tending towards chaos, a soft but insistent growling emerging through breaks in
the roiling background. It’s not threatening, but it still carries a thrill of
warning, signalling it shouldn’t be ignored.
‘Pipe’ steals in
stealthily, a gentle humming occasionally broken by vibrating drones that hang
suspended like motes in sunlight. As it progresses one imagines a blue sky
against which white clouds drift past and evolve in slow motion, transforming,
breaking apart, and reforming. Shapes and stories can read into the gradual
billows and curls unfolding, expanding and contracting, revealing and hiding in
a progressive unveiling. It’s a secret language, a natural one, the key to
which could lift the obscuring curtain from our eyes to reveal the hidden
things. Imperceptibly, however, the clouds grow greyer and darker, perhaps a
note of caution that everything changes and nothing stays the same.
In the last offering
‘Flowing’, a low bass drone flies in as from a distance, a granular buzz that,
swirls, gyrates, and propels itself through the stratospheric heights above our
heads, perhaps an obscure call from the remote cold and frigid boundaries. It’s
an all-pervasive blanket of sound, embracing and enfolding, energising and
invigorating. It’s the species of drone that seeps into the skin and settles,
suffusing the system with a thrilling intensity. One cannot help but feel
carried along with its flow, a liberating cascade of thoughts and feelings,
letting the streams propel us wither it wants to roam. It’s exhilarating yet
precarious, comforting but simultaneously disconcerting.
These are scintillating
creations, awash with subtle textural nuances and microtonic variations, always
hovering somewhere between divine and earthy, free-flying and
gravity-imprisoned. Each of the compositions lasts twenty minutes or longer,
allowing each one to unfold gradually and logically, but never losing their
focus or impetus. I found the suite as a whole strangely compelling, yin and
yang in equal measure but with graduated shades in between. The art here though
is that, despite an apparently limited palette, there’s still a sense of a
broad spectrum of colour and detail, nuanced inevitably of course, but still
there. I couldn’t have wished for a better introduction to the work of Purple
Crow.
(The final three tracks
are shortened, edited versions specifically engineered for radio broadcast, a
précis if you like of the full track.)
Available as a digital
download from:
Psymon Marshall 2019
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