Seabuckthorn - The Silence Woke Me

(Bookmaker Records, 2012)

Prolific craftsman of ambient acoustic raga soundscapes, Seabuckthorn returns with another evocative collection of songs, boosted by a subtle but tangibly bigger emphasis on rhythm than last years fantastic In Nightfall. Relying this time on his trusty 12-string acoustic, shruti box and whatever percussive instruments he had lying around, Seabuckthorn (aka Andy Cartwright) weaves together ten cohesive tracks that take you on a metaphysical journey through the Serengeti, the Amazon rainforest, Mayan ruins, with a few fleeting stopovers in the middle east and all with an underlying Indian drone. And he does all this without ever descending into the arena of Paul Simon's studied take on 'world music' or staying loyal to any particular geographic region, tribe or sect. Instead Cartwright has a natural propensity to folk music that feels ancient and steeped in mysticism. Enjoy the album as a whole and you'll soon forget the wettest British summer in a hundred years. An exceptional treasure.

[Originally published in Oxford Music Scene magazine, November 2012]

http://oxfordmusicblog.co.uk/Oxford%20Music%20Scene-21.pdf

 

Seabuckthorn - The Silence Woke Me

(Bookmaker Records, 2012)

Seabuckthorn is one of those artists best enjoyed over the course of an album rather than in small doses and on this latest release his impressionistic acoustic guitar work once again manages to conjure up dreamy landscapes, campfires and woodlands, all with his signature sense of menace and foreboding. The Silence Woke Me is Andy Cartwright's second album for French label Bookmaker Records but is at least his fifth release (not taking into account various self-released EPs and small-runs of mini CDs) and at this point in time Cartwright is a masterful composer. Building upon last year's excellent In Nightfall, The Silence Woke Me weaves a lot more rhythm into the mix, drums adding heft to Cartwright's 12-string flourishes, and even going so far as to introduce a pretty funky groove to final duo 'Gathered and Unkempt' and 'Good Honest Thievery.' While Cartwright's music has always flirted between atmospheric minimalism and frantic, multi-instrumental frenzy, the layered, rhythmic approach applied here strikes a perfect balance between scarcity and bombast which gives the album a more dynamic feel as a whole. And while it's not a term that really applies to the kind of music Seabuckthorn makes, The Silence Woke Me has more 'hooks' than anything he has done in years. Many of the songs elegantly shimmy in from silence and build tantra-like before reaching a central pattern of notes around which the guitar meanders – 'As Fire Moves', 'The Cool of the Coming Dark' and the closing track all find repetitions which give the songs a heated, hypnotic feel. The cymbal washes and relentless stomp of 'It Swept Across the Open' creep up on you before you realise you're in the centre of a storm of arpeggiating guitars and reverb-drenched notes that sound like whale song. The 12-string acoustic is the binding force that patches together not only all the songs of the album, but also elements like drums and shruti box – a kind of droning, Indian harmonium, played by sometime-collaborator Duncan Scott.

Where fellow Oxford-based instrumental prodigy Jerome 'Message to Bears' Alexander's pastoral chamber folk evokes a sense of child-like nostalgia, Cartwright is like Jerome's feral brother, raised in the forest by wolves. His music, while equally evocative, feels exotic and otherwordly; it invites you in with it's warm, campfire tones but leads you on a journey through treacherous, bizarre landscapes, all under the cover of darkness with only fire and moonlight illuminating you on your way. 

[Originally published in Nightshift Magazine, issue 207, October 2012] 

http://nightshift.oxfordmusic.net/2012/oct.pdf

Von Braun / The Graceful Slicks / The Old Grinding Young / Seabuckthorn @ The Wheatsheaf, Oxford, 25/11/2011

Photo (c) Pier Corona

A excellent line-up of contrasting yet strangely complementary local talent gathered for Von Braun’s EP launch at the Wheatsheaf, a night that slowly built up to Von Braun’s triumphant headline set.

Starting the evening off was Seabuckthorn, an artist who has impressed several MusicInOxford.co.uk writers with his recorded output of exotic, otherworldly soundscapes. His music is somewhat lost on a mostly apathetic opening-slot crowd, and his set perhaps slightly too long and meandering to hold their Friday-night attention, but those of us who surrendered ourselves to his hypnotic music were transfixed. For the first half of the set, he was joined by Duncan Scott who provided a constant drone with a Shruti box (a kind of Indian harmonium) which proved to be the perfect grounding for Seabuckthorn to improvise around a distinctly South American framework of flamenco flourishes and moody minor keys. Towards the end of the set he began to command the attention of the audience by creating distorted loops upon which to build screeching siren calls and a constant beat with a stomp box. It’s a shame that more people didn’t give Seabuckthorn the attention he undoubtedly deserved because his warm musical excursions are the perfect cure for the winter blues.

Next up was The Old Grinding Young which is the moniker of Ollie T, formerly of ute. Although this was one of his first solo outings, you wouldn’t know it, for Ollie commanded the stage with just an electric guitar and a microphone. Oh, and a late-Movember moustache: indeed, I soon found myself surrounded by a sea of them. The first impression left by the opening song is that The Old Grinding Young sound rather like ute, and I assumed that the set would be a series of confessional, if slightly warped, singer-songwritery type songs. But the set went from strength to strength and further away from the ute sound. ‘The King and the Knave’ had a Warpaint-go-medieval feel to it, while the set reached its manic high-point with set-closer ‘Down Daddy Down’. The hushed, melancholic tone of the rest of the set gave way to a frantic, bluesy one and Ollie’s mumbled croon became crazed – like the darker side of Jeff Buckley. The crowd give him a justifiably enthusiastic response. He ended on a high note.

The Graceful Slicks came with their own lighting (a kind of lava lamp affair) and immediately set the mood for their riotous ’60s garage rock freak-out. Opening song ‘Wasted’ had an authentic 13th Floor Elevators energy, which soon gave way to a relaxed bounce on ‘Rubbernecking’ (in which the band played tribute to Von Braun by incorporating a section of their song ‘Henry’s Girl’). By the time the band came to a stomping rendition of ‘Fire’ it was impossible not to get in on the fun of it all; they may not be one of the most original bands in Oxford, but they’re one of the most entertaining live bands I’ve seen in some time. For tonight’s set, at least, they moved away from the Haight-Ashbury, drugged-out vibe in favour of a high energy collection of songs with fuzz bass and excellent drumming providing a pulsing rhythm for the majority of their set. Great stuff.

Now, when one of the singers takes to the stage with a pint and a few shots of whiskey, the set can go one of two ways. Fortunately for Dave Anderson of Von Braun, the rush of whiskey to the blood seemed to do a world of good, giving their set a loose but explosive energy. From the aptly named ‘Opener’ to encore ‘Black Saxon’, Von Braun commanded the room with a set full of songs that many other bands in Oxford and elsewhere would envy. From the angular bounce of ‘Henry’s Girl’, ‘Folk Devil’ and ‘Mustard Picasso Man’, to the sweet melancholy of ‘Mr. Seaweed’, Von Braun proved themselves to be one of Oxford’s rising stars. Breakneck renditions of the poppy ‘End of Ecuador’ and ‘Cat/Dog’ threatened to self combust (drummer Gary Atkinson giving himself a particularly hard job in the faster moments of the latter) but somehow the band managed to come through in what can only be described as a thrilling performance. At one point, I turned around to see a packed Wheatsheaf cheering and nodding along to one of the songs, even demanding an encore at the end which the band coyly agreed to. Job done, go buy the EP.

A great night that displayed the wide spectrum of musical talent that Oxford has to offer. Truly fantastic.

[Originally published on MusicinOxford.co.uk, 27/11/2011]

http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2011/11/27/von-braun-the-graceful-slicks-the-old-grinding-young-seabuckthorn-the-wheatsheaf-oxford-25112011/

Seabuckthorn - In Nightfall

(Bookmaker Records, 2011)

Andy Cartwright, aka Seabuckthorn, has long been one of Oxford's most exciting, talented yet relatively unknown musicians. Perhaps his anonymity is of his own design but it's strangely fitting that such an insular artist could top readers polls and have only 35 likes on his facebook page (that most quantifiable indicator of popularity). Under the Seabuckthorn moniker, Andy has already released three albums as well as a handfull of home-made, self-released CDs and In Nightfall, his fourth album, is essentially a condensed hit of what he can do.

For an album with only seven songs that clock-in at only twenty-three minutes, In Nightfall is a truly cinematic affair and, as we've come to expect from Seabuckthorn, breathtakingly beautiful and evocative. The imagery that supports Seabuckthorn's releases has always provided us listeners with a starting point, or a spring-board, from which to mentally traverse vast, hushed landscapes, unforgiving deserts, solemn forests, ancient temples, hot dusty roads; locations that most of us never get to see. And the music provides us with the soundtrack for our journey.

'Address the Night,' with its slowly descending, overlapping guitar figures sets the stage for 'Journeyed Road,' a more enigmatic and energetic piece, and the album's most immediately engaging and kinetic song. 'Carrier' shares a certain tone with some of the more guitar-led songs on Four Tet's Pause, an album that evokes a similar mood. Like Pause, In Nightfall is awash with Asiatic and South American colours, crazed flamenco flourishes, arpeggios and looping guitar repititions ('The River Answered') while maintaing a kind of innate spirituality, as if the music on this album were the religious songs of an ancient civilization.

While much of the album could serve as the soundtrack for exploring arid foothills and exotic forest temples, “Gone Estray, Being Circled” is the soundtrack for entering a long-forgotten, foreboding shrine and being descended upon by malevolant spirits (you know the feeling). It is the atmospheric high-point of the album, the section that most explicitly creates a vision and a mood in our minds and where Seabuckthorn best demonstrates his skill as a cinematic composer, weaving woozy wind instruments together with deep, sparse piano notes and short, quick flurries of guitar.

“Burnt Offering” is the perfect ending to a stunning piece of art. A peaceful, lulling arpeggiating waltz – romantic 7^th notes and all – plays the album out, while notes so thoroughly drenched in reverb ring-out and bend that you can practically see and smell the smoke circling up into the ether.

As David Murphy wrote of Seabuckthorn's previous album A Mantra Pulled Apart, “picking favourite tracks is academic, your best bet being to let the record wash over you whilst staring out of the window into the evening.” You can scan In Nightfall for the most dynamic songs (“Journeyed Road”), the most atmospheric (“Gone Estray, Being Circled”) or the most beautiful (“Burnt Offering,” “Carrier”) but, as is often the case with artists like Seabuckthorn, the album seems to be a thematic whole that doesn't benefit from being segmented and broken apart. It feels like there is a natural progression in the tracklisting, like the songs are steps in a list of directions to some forgotten place.

You simply must listen to Seabuckthorn, a most transcendental artist.

[Originally published on Musicinoxford.co.uk, 09/07/11]

http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2011/07/09/seabuckthorn-in-nightfall-bookmaker-records/