musicAddicted

Simon Scott come back into his early shoegazing period through lengthy turn-offs and years of silence. This blog is pretty much obsessed with all forms of his artistic expression: every one of them is fully consistent with his obvious inclination towards uncompromising, omnipresent concept. If it is an idea of a quiet, repetitive music made for falling asleep (brought on Silenne release), or an unexpected desire for singing out his sorrows (Depart, Repeat; first of Sonic Pieces’ seven special vinyls), he always captures the inner blueness, finds an appropriate harmony on one of his guitars or basses and builds a body of lines, echoes, reverberations, layered beauties. Bunny (out on October 7th), his second album for an excellent label Miasmah oriented on dramatic, droning music, follows this suite, but somewhat upside down.

The fragility is hidden under layers of drones, murmurs and resonances of his heavy, whirring sonorous guitar and bass. Sometimes there are fragments of vocals, present on the initial composition Radiances or Angelo Badalamenti-like dark mysterious dissonances in the opening AC Waters and Labano. But the closing song Drilla uses all of these tricks in a different order, with fresh perspective and interesting effect. It builds a pulsing droning mass during a penultimate track Gamma to peak in the first minute of Drilla and then dissolves into lighter, brighter and smoother emotion. It sounds as if Scott decided he had enough darkness and needed a change: dramatic in its initial delivery and appealing in the evolution. The echoing guitar motive is picturesque, almost like from a book of pastoral scenes. That smooth melodic line sounds more than familiar: half of it must have been inspired by The Little Drummer Boy. At least unconsciously. Its peak is a simultaneous defragmentation of the entire surreal scenery and not only Drilla, but also the entire album Bunny falls back into confusing mist which is intensified and abruptly cut by a quick fast-forward effect. Scott decomposes Drilla into its atoms and as he reaches the smallest particle, he escapes into silence.

Not only Bunny sounds cinematic and uncompromising, but it’s also a strange expression of escapism and in the same moment contrasting inner imprisonment. Most of the songs are murky and the only lightness is sarcastic humour reminiscent of Lynch’s or Trier’s movies. However, Scott’s come-back into melodic instrumental shoegaze is welcome and successful. Never mind the pace or regularity of his releases, the message is essential. And the delivery, not only the concept surely belong Scott’s artistic strengths. (Hear Bunny in its entirety on Miasmah’s SoundCloud.)