Mark Beasley AKA Rothko and Steve Parry have been friends for many years which has included contributing to each other’s releases, but this the first time they have fully collaborated on a release. It might have been long overdue but HOWL was well worth the wait. If you’ve been familiar with Rothko’s body of work dating back over 20 years and Parry’s work as Hwyl Nofio (‘emotional swimmers’) and Neu Electrikk, then you know these are artists who have long histories of producing non-mainstream music of the highest quality.
Parry and Beasley say of the release, “it was created from pieces recorded by Steve on the organ in the ancient church that sits in the village where he lives, these recordings took a journey to an unexpected life of their own, they expanded into the realms of otherworldly places, of rituals, of passing through, to epiphanies. And beyond”
HOWL is comprised of two tracks around 20-minutes each: ‘In The Season Of Darkness’ (ITSOD) and ‘In The Season Of Light’ (ITSOL). Like all exceptional ambient music, the pieces draw you into a hermetically sealed world of sound and ‘ITSOD’ grows out of a pulsing organ sound with string scraping like claws on glass and the bass providing scything notes that punctuate the growing drone and soft picked out chords and harmonics. This is earth music; sounds that seem to emanate from subterranean locations, caverns deep within the earth that act like monolithic speaker chambers resounding with intrigue and menace.
If ‘ITSOD’ draws on the heft of stone and earth, then its antonym is ‘In The Season of Light’. ITSOL appears out of frozen wastelands and evoking an ancient sailing ship held frozen in place with the sound of glimmering crystals, the crack of shifting ice and haunted by the reedy organ sounds of a sailor’s accordion. The bass guitar is thinner here and swirls with electronics and treated sounds and the John Carpenter-like low synth-note at the halfway mark heralds sweeping bursts of frosty winds and a more placid passage before the drone returns to accompany a plaintive bass line to the end of the track.
Both pieces maintain a constant mood despite constant change and, in the way that Welsh sound artist Llyn Y Cwn creates hypnotic work that tunes into the ancient landscapes of North Wales, so Rothko and Steve Parry have created strange and intriguing worlds formed from granite and permafrost. It may have taken them the length of a friendship to collaborate fully but I hope HOWL is the first of many adventures mapping out these ‘otherworldly places’.
Rothko socials: Facebook | Bandcamp
Hwyl Nofio socials: Website | Bandcamp | X
Review by Paul F Cook
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