Brian Lavelle

My latest album, Ustrina, has just been released by Andrea Marutti of Afe Records in Italy. It’s a limited edition of 100 copies in a beautiful full colour photographic sleeve. My thanks to Andrea for the release and for doing such a fantastic job with the sleeve.

I also have copies available myself for anyone who is interested. Get in touch if you’d like one.

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Press release:

Ustrina consists of a single long-form work entitled ‘Pyre Nullity’, which is a set of dense, shifting cloudscapes, perhaps a little darker in focus than Lavelle’s last few releases and certainly his longest single composition to date. Its layers of ghostly, distant voices, subterranean drones and processed field recordings evoke forgotten realms, but this is not dark ambient music. Its compositional approach, subject matter and photographic imagery all point to hidden places, memories from a Golden Age cast on the fire, but not necessarily the darker side of existence. Indeed the cover suggests a possible modus operandi: cross the bridge, open the gate, move within.

The album utilises compositional ideas which date back to the mid 1990s, but which were not realised until very recently. Within the layers of ‘Pyre Nullity’ are electronic passages from certain recordings over a decade old, previously unreleased and now reworked, rejuvenated and redefined.

I’ve been listening to the Weather tonight, and for a large part of this week in fact.

By that I mean I’ve been listening to the fruits of the Space Weather recording session last Saturday in Glasgow. The line-up was as it is now and ever shall be, amen: Alistair Crosbie (electric guitar), me (synthesizer) and Andrew Paine (electric bass guitar).

It was another excellent session, full of laughter and joyous camaraderie, and it makes me think that for all we strive to do our solo recordings on our own to the best of our abilities, there is nothing like playing good music with good friends. I begin to see why certain people hate all the faff of studio work and live to play live together, whether that’s in front of an audience or not. There are some moments and extended passages of real beauty in what we did at the weekend, and that’s down to the three of us doing more or less with what we have in front of us.

There were pieces from the session which were just beautiful: understated and contemplative, but slowly burning with that strange SW magic that infects the first album we’ve already done (the cover is image at the top of this post).

There are also moments of pure wonderment at how these tracks come across in their recorded form, when compared to how I remember us playing them. Did we actually do this? It seems hard to believe. But the actuality of the smiles on our faces as we played them, and the memory of those smiles now, are the greater rewards in all of this.

One of the pieces essayed on Saturday was a long floating instrumental, which reminds me quite a bit of the work of a US group called Alien Planetscapes, who were stalwarts of the 80s home taper scene. They worked in a few experimental styles, but this kind of eerie space rock, with brilliant free floating bass (courtesy of Mr. P), was the kind of thing they did best I think.

One more session like last Saturday’s and we will have a second album to contend with before the first is even out. It makes you think…

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
–They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro–
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

At school, I had a fundamental difficulty with Robert Hardy’s work. I read Return of the Native in my last year, and I recall not enjoying it at all. Worse than that, Hardy’s Wessex was colourless, plodding and its denizens devoid of hope, at least as far as I could tell from my limited reading of that novel twenty years ago.

The poem above (‘Neutral Tones’) is from the 1898 volume Wessex Poems And Other Verses and I was amazed to drink in its bleak outlook. It rejoices in its lack of colour and now that seems to me to be an integral part of its beauty.

Our tastes changes over time; what was once dull for me because it seemed colourless is now emotionally effecting precisely because of that colourlessness. I should try Hardy again in longer form. Perhaps twenty years later I’ll be able to take some pleasure from its joyless panoply.