Taken from a live performance at the impressive St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh last year, this collaboration sees Colin Potter teaming up with Michael Begg to create everything from a rich, heavy blanket to a delicate spider web of sound. Over the course of the performance, they continually force us to shift our attention as they move across a range of soundscapes. Unnatural vibrations collide with vaguely recognizable field recordings, making a sublime hybrid between the real world and a fantastic alternative to day to day listening.
Omnempathy / ICR
The recording manages to convey the echoing environs of the performance; the reverberation in the cathedral nearly playing as much of a role as either performer. The sounds generated and processed by Potter and Begg are exaggerated by the acoustics of the room and illusions are commonplace. The apparent church organ that appears early on in the performance during "Carnethy" may instead be a disguised guitar (as alluded to by Begg in an interview prior to the performance). These illusory tactics go further than the sounds on the album; the picture on the cover depicting stylish lampshades turns out to be a bunch of men’s vests with light bulbs shoved inside them.
At times, the music accumulates into a thick black rain cloud, promising to unleash an unearthly tempest. On "Braid," the sound of running water and the bass-heavy drones together sounds like a bonfire burning and we are stuck at its center as listeners. Yet, it is not all a foreboding storm as the duo sculpts delicate forms out of the found sounds and instruments at their disposal. The melancholic, deconstructed guitar of "Harper Rig" snakes around itself to produce a twisting and gorgeous mass of sliding notes; sitting somewhere between the soundtrack without a film beauty of Stars of the Lid and the grittier explorations of Begg’s main project Human Greed. The way the duo dance between these disparate moods without breaking the flow of Fragile Pitches is not surprising considering their previous work (both apart and together with Fovea Hex) but it is still impressive.
The limited edition of Fragile Pitches comes with a bonus disc containing the pre-recorded music that was played in the cathedral before and after the live performance. At over an hour long, it is a substantial addition to Fragile Pitches but by no means prolongs the album to the point where it is an endurance test to listen to it all. "Lymphoy: A Precise Flight" lacks the rounded edges of the cathedral’s acoustics but allows a clearer look at Potter and Begg’s compositions. Reminiscent of Nurse With Wound’s The Memory Surface, there is less variation here compared to the actual performance but the focus is now on the microscopic textures that give Fragile Pitches its personality. The gradually evolving and slowly moving waves that underpinned the live performance are given the spotlight and they are as interesting like as they are buried under the various other sounds that the duo used.
Although it is a live album, Fragile Pitches never truly feels like it happened here on earth. It has a wobbly, hazy presence throughout as Potter and Begg straddle the border between here and a place where an M.C. Escher drawing is taken as a blueprint. Each time I finish listening, I feel like I have been on a journey but like a dream dissolves upon wakening, my memories of where I have gone dissipate into the void Potter and Begg have just vacated.
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