Whilst it’s sometimes difficult to specify what a body of work is about, beyond what you might hear, there are often a few highly obvious clues that help frame things. This meaning doesn’t need to be highly complex, but when dealing with the sort of adventurous sounds we love at OBLADADA, often the title and sleeve artwork somehow solidifies the project. These elements form like a method of triangulation. Out of everything in the universe, why have these very exacting layers of very specific strangeness been gathered on this album sized pinhead?
In Bea Brennan’s case, her new album Trances People Live had me remembering those times I’d unlocked a new world through my fingertips – drawing with charcoal at art school. Far from the security of a pencil, charcoal gains access into a tonal world that quickly and messily crumbles and accumulates into atmospheric places and forms. The actual paper became a shimmering integral layer in the scene, highlights and details could be rubbed out or added over the mid-tones, the contrasts, the way light bounces over objects and details, suggested in a few well-chosen marks and gestures.
The drawing on the sleeve reminds me of all those things. The artwork entitled Day Trip by Brennan, captures 3 people gathered in the foreground of somewhere presumably leafy and green. Each figure has the merest suggestion of a face, the scene is incomplete, at the cusp of monochromatic abstraction but the sense is, the scene is a happy one.
Somehow, this blurred woozy version of reality easily dovetails into the music. 9 tracks that seem to delight in teasing foreground and background from hugely similar elements. Like charcoal, every sound here feels like it’s drawn from a deliberately restricted tonal palette.
The opener Can You? is like a laser beam, tuned like a radio dial, before being ushered into the pulsations of Chance. Then, A Fanciful or Impractical Idea or Theory rises in oily mirages, whilst scribbles gather into celestial arcs in The Unconscious.
As the album opens into the night forest scenes of Flutes and Tubes, it becomes apparent how much these seemingly tiny gestures yield so much. The ambient patterning of Stepping Rotations is like light bouncing over tumbling water.
However, the album finally reaches its heart in the near 9-minute perfection of Freedom. A deep drift through hyper smudged beauty, reminiscent of the moss laden foggy bliss of Francesco Messina’s Prati Bagnati del Monte Analogo.
The album concludes in the soft washes and agitated jangling and bleeping of Rushing In, and finally the earth-based clank of Lost Track.
In the several times we have zoned out to Trances People Live, it’s apparent how so much comes from so little. An album that thrives on contradiction, ambient music to play loud, drones with some sense of rhythmic underwiring. In the notes that accompany the release, Brennan shares that the album and track titles all come from a self help book that she never actually managed to fully investigate. Somehow the general idea is enough, just like the drawing on the sleeve, or indeed the music within. That sense of how much is required to activate and outline the presence of magic, and what would be too much.
Trances People Live recognises the most unique of lines between these extremes, the perfect balance of mysterious and wonderful.
Trances People Live is released on Old Technology, and is available digitally and on CD
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