Contours - Balafon Sketches

Maiden release on a new imprint outta Stockport is this vinyl pressing of the Contours cassette from last year, something i wont now pretend to have caught first time around. Fortunately Net of Gems are here to fill the gaps. Contours is Manchester based producer Tom Burford, and Balafon Sketches was recorded with a series of multi-instrumentalists while travelling back and forth to Cumbria, yet the result speaks of something very different. I'm gonna call this kind of music making 'post-NTS music', born of an international, genre-fluid approach, highly musical in nature and with a clear anything's possible attitude. As such, it's hard to accurately categorise, drawing in elements of gamelan, African polyrhythms, fourth world aesthetics, 12th Isle-style komische/kraut mutations, Popul Vuh cosmology and a Francis Bebey like playfulness. I mean, yeah, it's a lot, but the spirit of experimentation doesn't obscure the path and the results are impressively cohesive, another rechannelling of liberating Organic Music Society anti-dogma. Educated and instinctive. How a group of musicians from the North West get here from there is not for me, but bless the inquiring mind.