Prolific barely covers the activity of memotone's Will Yates, an artist never absent long enough to miss yet one who always seems to turn up with something new that surprises and compells. And so it runs with Pruning, the first memotone record for Discrepant, which is less a new album as it a rarities collection surveying the surely mammoth hard drive he's sitting on in Wales (watch the lights of the country dim as he fires it up...). These ten tracks mostly find Yates in a different mode of expression to that present on Tollard and Fever to the World LPs he issued last year, replacing the ornate, pastoral vistas with something a little more, shall we say, Discrepant-orientated, exploring a kind of decayed Fourth World sound universe that finds a very savvy overlap between Actress and Jon Hassell. If those recent records were defined by a late-evening, early Autumn sense of quietutde, then Pruning sees the sun much higher in the sky, almost ebullient at times, but still nonetheless driven by the rich palette of sound and influence Yates typically draws on. There's often been the sense with Yates as not just that of an accomplished player, but an avid listener to. Pruning displays evidence of his ears bending in ever new directions once again.
