Yellow Vinyl
Evolved subterranean purgatorial blues on this third collaborative outing for the cross-Pennine by way of Sweden trio, following those two lockdown-era collections that landed in quick succession in 2020. Much of Collin's pre-2020 music involved an active deconstructing and recalibration of the blues, caught somewhere between Jack Rose, Loren Connors and Alan Licht. While it's a set of influences he's unlikely to leave fully behind, the release of Bridge Variations in 2022 represented a compositional shift towards arcing drones and seemed to usher in his best work to date. It's this approach into which he also leans here, making use of a homemade nyckelharpa, a hybridized viola type instrument that'll resonate with anyone with a keen ear for Arthur Russell. Like on Bridge Variations, Collin plays with loops and repeated refrains, creating vast, circling clouds that spiral infinitely into themselves, a folk music imploding of sorts. An album of these sounds alone would be notable, but when allied with the spectral touch of Demdike Stare, conjures an especially inviting fog of psychogeographic dream wandering through liminal space. The shadows of the Pennines loom large, the intersection of indeterminable ghostbox samples as if random figures or wraiths appearing suddenly from the mist to then disappear again - were they ever even there anyway? Minerals' strength is in leaving that question hanging in the air a long time after the needle's come up.far.
