The Dengie Hundred With Gemma Blackshaw - Who Will You Love

WOE brethren The Dengie Hundred return with a deeply connective collaboration with Gemma Blackshaw that explores the liminal spaces of care giving and receiving, and shared intimacies. Indeed, space and time, as both aesthetic and malleable concept, have been long standing concerns of The Dengie Hundred, what we might broadly understand as psychogeographic or - and forgive the usage - hypnagogic, caught at the threshold of understanding where form is hazy but feeling is very physical and real. Here Blackshaw's vocal presence is instrumental in shifting such cerebral ideas into more emotionally redolent terrain - this is music making with a distinctly personal and domestic quality, the echo of voices, either sung or overhard, seemingly recorded at the edge of night where all else might be quiet, and the pulse of human bodies and private hum of the dark feel like the dominant frequencies. I've previously labeled this kind of thing 'purgatorial pop', and there's certainly some kinship displayed with the shadowy sensuality of Carla dal Forno and early Julia Holter, while you could also draw some lines back to the more outeredge expressions of late 90s post-rock ala the Bristol scene or the extended Kranky universe (something which the Quietus deftly picked up on in their recent review). Moreover, as a title, Who Will You Love? is markedly unambiguous in its directness, though the fogged-glass soundworld of the music contained within is as mysterious and undefined a counterpoint response as such a question might elicit. It is, after all, a big question - love is complex and myriad, our understandings of it are fluid and specific. The Dengie Hundred and Blackshaw are sharp enough to know there's little point in offering up any definitive conclusions. The real truths seem to come from the exploration itself.