smallest things by memotone

Will Yates has made music as Memotone since 2007. He operates in the tradition of what Robert Fripp has called 'a small, independent, mobile, and intelligent unit.' If you book him, he will come. When he arrives, he will have everything he needs to make his complex, engaging music: a clarinet, a guitar, synths, samplers and pedals, quickly unpacked in the corner of a club, gallery or village hall. Starting small, he will build layer upon layer of melody, accompanying himself and cutting across himself, creating a music that avoids cliche and moves beyond easy description. His recordings have followed the same trajectory. Moving quickly, he has released fifteen or so albums across various labels. Taken together, these recordings are the sound of a skilled, inventive composer pushing at the edges of what he wants to listen to himself. It is possible to hear a variety of influences in his music: folk and jazz forms, the textural inventiveness of British DIY electronica and Chicago post-rock and the blurred sci-fi brass of Jon Hassell are all discernible. But mostly, Will's work seems to stem from a constant drift between long hours in his home studio, and time spent outside in the woods and hills around his home in Wales.

On first listen, I feel like I am on unfamiliar ground with this new Memotone album. Its textures are dry and brittle, its weave open and loose. But even the first time I return to it, lushness creeps in at the edges, tiny green shoots on what appeared to be bare soil. smallest things sheds the skin of Will's previous recordings, removing the electronics and the looping and layering of previous work, to create something almost entirely acoustic. But don't be fooled into imagining music that's folksy, pastoral or twee. Opening track 'I Could See the Smallest Things' is a statement of intent. Widely spaced guitar is underpinned by earthy cello and sleepwalking clarinet, making a gorgeous threadbare pattern, which recalls a Morton Feldman miniature or a Morandi still life. 'Glimpse' immediately follows, starting with a clockwork rhythm that is subverted with rippling free percussion and filmic strings. Tipsy and lovelorn live favourite 'Time is Away Theme' finally makes an appearance on vinyl. The clonks, scrapes and whispered vocals of 'Keep the Change' are straight from a Robert Wyatt daydream and beautiful album closer, 'In Dreams', with vocals from Eva May, hovers in the same space as Janet Sherbourne's work with Jan Steele or Julie Tippetts' Sunset Glow.

Earlier in the spring, I drove with Will from Fife to Glasgow through a rolling Scottish landscape, just about to turn from brown to green. As our conversation ranged from teenage hip hop obsessions to the corpse of a Pine Marten spotted by the side of the road, I got a sense of what really powers this music. Beyond the skill involved and the years of self-taught music making that have gone into putting this record together, it is Will's close, careful attention and his talent for existing, observing and creating in the moment that make his work special. - Jack Rollo

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