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With Ghost Stations (46'28"), Marconi Union continues their independent streak. Soft but intense, with a real electricity running through it, this album presents four tracks from the liminal regions of abandoned places - a realm just beyond our reach. Soulful and restrained, their studio sessions inject emotion and expression into what would otherwise appear to be a formal experience. Along with subtle drumming, sweetly forlorn piano notes and the atmospheric washes of electric guitar tones, Ghost Stations combines an occasional reverberant trumpet and clarinet playing with its slow buzzing guitar leads, organ chords and throbbing basslines - producing fluctuating moods of vitality and contemplation. Warm synthesizer beds support strangely unidentified sounds as whirring digital textures crackle, hum and darken amidst pulsing beats and ably plucked steel strings. Beneath this falling twilight MU forms prominent relations with their audience. Moving at an easy pace from tension to repose, each piece resolves intelligently into the next. Their place in space is found, rather than arrived at. Hinting at Jazz, Ambient, Kraut-Rock and film soundtracks Marconi Union works in a genre that welcomes the listener's thinking. It is fortunate for us that they take us along with them into evermore sonic intrigue. For this outfit each new release is an unlocking of a larger space of capabilities and possibilities. The music they produce is a dependable pleasure.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 28 July 2016 |
