7"
Nothing like a dose of Little Skull to remind you of what season you're facing. Feel the nip of that wind, draw the neck into the coat collar and silently wonder oh where the time does go - the music made by Dean Brown seems to encourage such thinking. On this latest outing for Horn of Plenty - in trademark hand-crafted packaging, worth the price of entry alone - we experience Brown's carefully framed lonesome drone (dronesome?) blues in miniature, which is to say ten minutes of untitled music across two sides of one 7". Short(er) run time notwithstanding, there's a cavernous world inside these wordless songs that says so much, hugely evocative, border-line cinematic epics built from the dusty bodies of instruments no doubt older than me (which is, officially, now quite old). Strings 'n' other things arc and sing, a bewitching brew of NZ lathe cut noise and folk, which this time around strangely reminds me of the instrumental aspects of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Song recast in the vision of World Resources or perhaps the cluster of related activity around Loren Connor's in the 90s (Suzanne Langille, San Agustin, Haunted House). But really, with a catalogue 21 years in the making, I'm mainly just talking about Little Skull, and its quiet ways of communicating big ideas. Perhaps, then, the 7" is the ideal format for such things. Edition of 200.
