Neil S. Kvern

Heavenly Persona

Genre: ELECTRONIC

MP3
FLAC
WAV

Boomkat Product Review:

Pete Swanson & Jed Bindeman’s FTS conjure a near-mythical 1983 side of meditative, piano-led minimalism referencing indigenous American musics and North West Pacific US landscapes with a sublime spirit and hypnagogic effect

Following the label’s unearthed treasures by the likes of Ernest Hood, Rimarimba, and Michele Mercure, FTS continue to bring c.20th music’s fringes into focus with Neil S. Kvern’s pinch-yourself dream sequence of elegantly fluttering and tape-saturated thoughts for piano. Also peppered with wooden percussion, lissom guitar, tambour, marimba, recorder, desk lamp, metal fish, voice, and sparingly dappled with effects, the results have long been the preserve of a handful of the artist’s friends (and their friends) until FTS stepped in this edition, which is not so much a reissue as its first release, proper, to a wider audience.

‘Doctor Dancing Mask: Pianoisms’ is bound to be received with affection for its plaintive charms, which can be heard to echo the rolling rhythmelodic structures of Woo as much as Ernest Hood’s blissfully nostalgic wooze or, at times, the daydreamy drift of Dominique Lawalrée. Gently listing and pitch bent with wow and flutter the album follows trickling ritual rhythms inspired by the music of indigenous Americans to find a slow-burning sense of immanence and calm across a sprawling topology of durational works such as opener ’Slow Mirrors / Big Circle’, and tintinnabulating tongue-tip beauty of ‘Purple Scarf’, or the 14 minutes of windborne sway in ‘The Longer of Two Nights’, via more succinct gems coming across like a lo-fi Charlemagne Palestine heading north on ‘Woodhenge’, and at its most enigmatic in ‘Some Travelers Said to a Peasant Girl’, which benefits from his vocals buried inthe mix with Constance Maytum.

MP3 Release (10)