Screen-printed chip board sleeve
Gayle Brogan's long-running solo project Pefkin returns to Belgian imprint Morc for another collection of earthy and elemental ambi-folk-drone composition. Brogan's interest in nature continues, elucidating a seasonal shift from winter to spring in the blooming (nee Unfurling...) arrangements of strings, synth and ethereal vocal. Both the aesthetic presentation and conceptual framework are reminiscent of Liz Harris/Grouper's interest in the sea, and more broadly how the environment around you tends to shape and guide the music made. Based in Sheffield, Brogan is of course less likely to be influenced by the ocean (notwithstanding of course the sound of lapping waves that open album centrepiece, 'The Sun of the West'), though the 'England's Hidden Reverse'-like channeling of the occluded and occultish dimensions of the countryside is at least comparable in how the music proves a kind of psychogeographic inflection of space and time. There's something overtly traditional being divined here, a sense that these elongated, ghostly hymns are being drawn from the soil, as if Brogan might just be a willing vessel for a type of song that's been existent in the ether and/or earth long before her. Such an endeavour is undoubtedly grandiose and serious, reflected in tracks like the monolithic 'My Breath The Sea', a 12-minute folk-drone possessed of a solemnity that really doubles down on that sense of the bleak midwinter. Still, it's not an entirely ominous and foreboding affair, as little beams of light glisten through the dense arrangement of closer 'The Moon Unveiled' and the genty radiant 'Sun Flecks', suggestive of that long standing adage that it's only at its darkest just before the dawn. Unfurling finds itself caught in that kind of very elemental cycle.
FFO: Coil, Popol Vuh, Grouper, Sarah Davachi
