album // Revox Volume 1
Of Revox, Simon Fisher Turner has remarked that this is an album he really likes. It's perhaps easy to see why, as this has the feeling of a suite of personal home recordings, from the song titles - which are tributes to individuals Turner has collaborated with over the years, including Holger Czukay and Colin Lloyd-Tucker, or those who he feels influenced by - through to the short 'snapshot' atmospheres of the first eight pieces. Turner 'fesses up his love of the Revox reel-to-reel recorder in the sleeve notes, an obsession developed after a spell tinkering with a machine owned by his erstwhile career guru Jonathon King in the 1970s. His reverential attitude toward the machine helps give this album its carefully-constructed minimalism, whilst also benefitting from Turner's consistent high production ethic.
By now, I'm quite used to being pleasantly surprised by the twists and turns of style that Turner often makes, and Revox is thankfully no exception: this disc traverses a whole bunch of different styles along the way, incorporating some chilling theatrical organ chords on the opening track ('Scott'), plucked guitar layers ('I Just Woke Up Man, Is It Early?'), Eno-esque floating synth meditations ('Blackouts'), icy - almost silent - miniature sound worlds and drones reminiscent of Thomas Koener or Biosphere ('Lunch At Great Rissington' and 'Recover'), or quirky digitised ethno guitar pop ('Popsong 93 [2]'). Elsewhere, what sounds like a barely-processed atmosphere is dropped in on the brief and fleeting 'The Boxer', while 'Stuck Inside Lady' finds Turner taking up the mic for a surprising electro-pop tune, featuring all manner of crunchy beats, loops and unusual percussive melodies. 'Miaw' brings together echoing childlike voices, which is nowhere near as sinister as it may sound. (For a small moment, I thought that the guitar-based 'Sappora Sky' also featured some hitherto-unheard-by-this-listener wood flute, but it just turns out to be intermittent squalls of wind blowing through the rubber seal of the door of the coach I'm currently sitting on.) 'Where Are We Going' features an array of gamelan-esque instruments which are interspersed with guitar sounds, creating an atmosphere not dissimilar from Cage's work for prepared piano or the modern composition work of Errolyn Wallen.
The album closes with the ten-minute, comparatively epic 'Moist', which was co-written with veteran engineer and Eno accolyte Markus Draws. In many respect's the album's centrepiece, 'Moist' melds together swirling keyboards, gentle guitar licks and atmospheric one-off bursts of white noise and distortion from the guitar, along with a whole host of queasy, slightly out-of-tune or maybe even vocoder-ed organ sounds. The whole sound appears to be then fed through a heavy dose of reverb, leaving behind clouds of slowly-dissipating sonic texture.
The album knits together as one long piece, which makes total sense given both the miniature nature of much of the sonic content, as well as Turner's masterful atmosphere-creation technique. Oftentimes quite cloying and threatening, others playful and almost joyous, this again places Turner at the top of his genre. Notice also that I have avoided classifying this conveniently as 'ambient', as I saw one online review of an SFT album did. I can't abide such easy branding.