It’s surprising to realise i’ve not given US sound artist Colin Andrew Sheffield some attention for a long time. His 2008 album Signatures made it into my very first Best Albums of the Year way back in 2008, since when i have to admit to playing catch-up with his work. Polarities, a 2017 collaboration with James Eck Rippie might have made it onto that year’s Best Albums list but i didn’t encounter it until the following year; likewise, 2018’s Repair Me Now should have been on that year’s list but i only found my way to that one two years late. So i’m happy to make amends by flagging up Sheffield’s latest release, Images, which is easily among the most engrossing albums i’ve heard this year.
Sheffield often turns to extant music as the basis for his own, and it’s jazz that serves as the starting point for the eight tracks on Images. The result is an amalgam of plunderphonics, ambient and hauntology, in a way that often brings to mind James Kirby’s seminal The Death of Rave. As such, there’s a sense of nostalgia permeating Images, though equally Sheffield takes a somewhat abstract approach, interested less in what jazz is than what it’s made of, to the extent that this is not so much a homage as a direct response to the kinds of timbres and gestures found in the source material.
The hauntological aspect emerges not just from the sound sculptures themselves, but also their titles. ‘Crescent’, ‘Eclipse’, ‘Silhouette’, ‘Embers’ – these words all imply the remains or traces of something that can’t any longer be properly perceived. On the other hand, titles like ‘Images’, ‘Song No. 2’, ‘Daylight’ and ‘Patterns’ suggest the opposite, something more obviously tangible, yet here too certainty of what we’re hearing is, to say the least, complicated.
It’s an aesthetic choice, but Sheffield clearly delights in sculpting and mangling his sources in a way that sounds crude and obvious: to put it another way, there’s no attempt to hide or prettify the creative process. ‘Crescent’ is therefore the ideal way to open the album, being as it is a dense texture very obviously made up of a jumble of things being mashed up, with cymbals emerging especially prominently. Having established the paradigm, halfway through a chorus of saxophones muscles their way to the surface. Oftentimes, specifics are much harder to make out, as in ‘Silhouette’, which is rooted in a dense, reverberant, buzzy blur. Clearer elements can be heard emerging from within, and later, pitches seem to be protruding from this dark nucleus, but even when Sheffield clarifies things we’re left with the tantalising impression of a possible song trying (and failing) to make itself heard.
A similarly complex manifestation of (un)clarity is heard in ‘Embers’ where, even if one reads the opening percussive sounds (wrongly, no doubt) as akin to a crackling fire, hardly anything seems tangible. Pseudo-gongs and sustained tones appear to be cycling round in this particular dense core; cymbals and snare drum just about coalesce (the latter sounding like waves on a shore) but become lost in blurry bass. Interestingly, this is one of several tracks on Images where clarity seems to be happening just at the point that the track ends, which only heightens its beguiling, disorienting effect. Another aspect that recurs several times is the impression of an idea circling round and round, which in the title track takes on the poignant notion of wistfully remembering a dim, half-forgotten memory. A muffled chord progression slowly rotates in a remote, reverberant fug, the soundworld dreamy but distant. Here, too, the layers of obfuscation clear just as the track fades away, leaving us speculating as to what it was that might have materialised.
Especially striking are the times when Sheffield embraces this fuzzy obscurity and becomes focused on it. ‘Daylight’ seemingly takes its title from the brightness of its metallic, hard-edged shimmer, which has a transfixing effect. Rather than revealing details within, this outward shimmer appears to be modulated by otherwise unfathomable inner material, forming strange, quasi-melodic contours that together form a madly convoluted topography. ‘Eclipse’ goes further, with a shifting wall of stuff (vaguely redolent of Marko Ciciliani’s Pop Wall Alphabet), exhibiting a similarly abrasive kind of glitter, that’s genuinely lovely to be immersed in, yet with the unsettling implied threat that it could overwhelm at any moment. Yet again, Sheffield teases the prospect of something other at its end, easing off to reveal shining motes floating in space.
This kind of intense focus is at its most complete in final track ‘Patterns’. It’s tempting to think of it as the most ‘ambient’ music on the album, with its semi-static rippling, like a single object comprised of assorted elements, pitch, noise, both/neither, all waxing and waning in an exquisite equilibrium. Yet in practice nothing on the album is ambient in any meaningful sense, and in ‘Patterns’ the elusiveness (even, in the best sense, impenetrability) of the music encourages nothing other than the most active listening – there’s nothing remotely ‘ignorable’ here. Nonetheless, ‘Patterns’ is Images at its most overtly beautiful, maintaining this alluring balance even as certain elements come forward, very high tones appear and a mid-range band of sound swells. Once again, we catch a glimpse of another cycling idea in the depths shortly before it dies away, maintaining the album’s mesmeric elusiveness to the very end.
Released on the Elevator Bath label earlier this year, Images is available on vinyl and download.
[…] “Sheffield often turns to extant music as the basis for his own, and it’s jazz that serves as the starting point for the eight tracks on Images. The result is an amalgam of plunderphonics, ambient and hauntology, in a way that often brings to mind James Kirby’s seminal The Death of Rave. As such, there’s a sense of nostalgia permeating Images, though equally Sheffield takes a somewhat abstract approach, interested less in what jazz is than what it’s made of, to the extent that this is not so much a homage as a direct response to the kinds of timbres and gestures found in the source material. … It’s an aesthetic choice, but Sheffield clearly delights in sculpting and mangling his sources in a way that sounds crude and obvious: to put it another way, there’s no attempt to hide or prettify the creative process. ‘Crescent’ is therefore the ideal way to open the album, being as it is a dense texture very obviously made up of a jumble of things being mashed up, with cymbals emerging especially prominently. … Especially striking are the times when Sheffield embraces this fuzzy obscurity and becomes focused on it. ‘Daylight’ seemingly takes its title from the brightness of its metallic, hard-edged shimmer, which has a transfixing effect. Rather than revealing details within, this outward shimmer appears to be modulated by otherwise unfathomable inner material, forming strange, quasi-melodic contours that together form a madly convoluted topography.” [reviewed in December] […]