Port Royal - Flares

It starts the way a Stars of The Lid album might start.

Some ambient sound, muffled voices, a vague electric violin sound with a mordant piano figure.

Repeat with slight changes over a lengthy period and you acquire that same sense as a SOTL album brings... a sense of biological change...

It's like watching a movie of clouds changing, or streets streaming with headlights. It's like watching evolution at a cellular level.

To listen to, the repetitions fade and alter. Moments of pristine beauty emerge like clearings, stages, clear blue sky.

Then at times a little cologne-electronica-style percussion arises, flourishes, dominates briefly, then fades and blinks out..

It's a little like the passing through of a fair or

A record like this can't be described in words. Only the effect of listening to it, which is an act of faith.

How did I come by it? I don't know. Somehow, I chose it. From a review perhaps, or an Amazon list. Somewhere I'm sure I'd have heard a comparison to Stars of the lid, and that would probably have been enough.

When it arrived I put it to the bottom of the pile. Not sure what it was.

2 days later it found it's way to the CD player. To say a day hasn't passed since without an appearance would be true, but that's only a week now. Still quite an achievement for a CD I know nothing about, and in a way I love this anonymity. Not kowing ANYTHING about a record allows you to listen without any preconceptions.

But a track like "spetsnaz/paul leni" are so moving on first listen that no kind of preconception is necessary.

Myself I'm a bit wary of track 5, which appears to have run away from another album by someone else and found a small corner of this record to hide in.

When transferring it to one's Creative Zen, this track may go missing, but is followed by the most wonderful "karola bloch", again a song I cannot describe - some blog eh?

Listen, if you have any feeling for Stars of the lid, or for Tortoise, Mogwai or anything that remotely has these same qualities, then this I think will touch the right spot, If not, I'd listen on Pandora before taking a gamble.