His Name Is Alive - Hope Is A Candle: Home Recordings 1985 - 1990 Volume 3

Clear Vinyl

Final installment in Disciples' excavation of the His Name is Alive archives, drawing on the tape experiments Warren Defever recorded as a teenager. Those familiar with Defever's work, both on 4AD and these recent reissues, will know him as prodigious and prolific, but it's still worth noting how far removed this music is from conventional understandings of 'teenage music'. Nearly entirely instrumental, these 13 songs are at once rich, expressive, abstract, unhurried, shapeless and vast, suggesting a private emotional language sophisticated beyond its maker's years. Tell me these are new recordings, and i wont doubt you. I understand a number of these songs were included on the demo that caught the attention of Ivo Watts Russell, and there's definitely that stamp of dreamworld ethereality and pregnant mystery that defined 4AD's imperial era, yet they're almost entirely free of the bombast of, say, Dead Can Dance or Cocteaus. The muted percussion of 'Disappear', for example, recalls the fourth world tropes of Hassell and Eno, and in 'Pass', 'Nearby' and 'Halo' you can hear various strands of the post-industrial neo-folk inspirations shared by Coil, O Yuki Conjugate and Muslimguaze. It's clear Defever was on a unique path from the off. This grabbed the ears of 4AD way back when, and it's gonna do the same now for a whole load of new listeners, so i think we can now start thinking of this as the eternal music it always was.