A spooky, uncanny openingstrack really fetches my attention immediately, as I play ‘A lick is good for the soul’. The track is called ‘Spook is now’ and it is probably created out of manipulated electric guitar.
This stuff reminds my of Gy!be and especially the album ‘F#A[infinity symbol]’. It’s the sound of unrest, of something evil brooding underneath a calm surface, and therefore quite unsettling. Then, 48 seconds of someone tuning his guitar, which is track two, and track three, 35 seconds of pure strumming. These are strange short intermezzo’s for an album consisting of long droning tracks. ‘Falling sleep’ could be extracted directly from David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ as it is a distorted, nightmarish piece. The very minimal next track ‘Early devil in kind’, is a welcome transition in the record since it it’s not so oppressing and seems evoked in a room with more light. It’s probably an experiment with the sonority of an acoustic guitar ,but I’m not sure. It’s only the last track ‘The end of all’ that has something of rhythm, a throbbing biased beat that is. But it is as abstract as the others.
On the whole, Nick Davidson creates abstract pieces, mainly constructed out of manipulated guitar. They are long, some minimal, and consist out of singular drones that evolve over time. The sounds are (luckily I would say) not bright or smooth but more rough and crackly.
Don’t be misled by Davidson’s background (according to the Evelyn Records website he is ‘drawing from earlier incarnations in the fields of drum n’ bass and jungle’) because this is something totally different then stated genres.
