Mark Fell & Rian Treanor

Last exit to Chickenley

Genre: ELECTRONIC, DOCUMENTARY

MP3
FLAC
WAV

Boomkat Product Review:

As far as we can tell this is the first full length collaboration between Mark Fell and his son Rian Treanor, a sprawling, incredibly detailed 90 minute opus that sits somewhere between pastoral/environmental music and plasmic Musique Concrète, recorded in and around their garden in Rotherham, South Yorkshire over the summer last year. We’ve listened to it countless times and still can’t fully get our head round it, we think its one of the most ambitious and intricate renditions of Quiet music you’ll likely ever hear - a huge recommendation if you're into Jakob Ullmann, Arthur Lipsett, Lambkin, Parmegiani, Rashad Becker, Marginal Consort and of course Fell & Treanor’s own work - one to immerse yrself in with zero distractions.

Fractal not fractional, these recordings weave Fell & Treanor’s signature palettes in previously unheard, unpredictable ways; incorporating their interests in the expressive intricacies of Indian Raga music with an inherent sense of Japanese wabi-sabi and a patina of location recordings, to realise a blossoming, allegorical sort of sound bath or sonic garden. The presence of Mark’s parents meant they steered clear of “dance” music or anything that attacked, tempering the sound to an ultra subtle flux of feathered, polymetric percussion, trickling keys, and glowing electronic tones sensitive to their shared family space. Its effect would gently lull Rian’s gran to sleep, and likewise exerts the same influence on us; convecting a zen-like balminess that aligns the chakras and is a genuine wonder to experience.

Time and place melt into an inception-like routine alien to normality, ultimately resembling the patterns of non-linear, cyclic time consciousness Mark had been reading about, and his music with Rian follows this logic; folding in and out of itself with a surreal quality. What start out as sections of location recorded snapshots - people milling in the background, a wind chime, gentle breeze, birds chirping - get slowly augmented by washes of electrostatic, filigree electronics, pulsing subs and sudden percussive bursts, enveloping your ears to transport you to unknown dimensions; somewhere between that Rotherham garden and the furthest reaches of your imagination. For a 90 minute piece of expressionism, what stands out about ‘Last exit to Chickenley’ is how remarkably architectural it is; detailed in every nook, resolved from every angle.

We’ll leave the backstory for you to read in the included liner notes, but in the meantime we urge you to give up a couple of hours of your time to fully immerse yourself in this singular, remarkable album.

MP3 Release (1)