littlebow

Sneaking into our air space and sprinkling its adoring affection upon everything it touches is the latest lovely from littlebow. Heavy hearted as we were in discovering we’d somehow missed their debuting ‘the edge blown aerophone’ from a year or so ago our gnashing of teeth tendencies were soon cooed by the strange fleet footed fancies drifting from out of the sweetly cured grooves contained within. For those previously sat in the dark unaware of their existence – littlebow is the collaborative noodling of Katie English and Keiron Phelan, the former more easily identified as Isnaj Dui whose work including this here missive has been mentioned in musings long since past while the latter if I recall rightly last visited upon these pages being part of that quite beguiling smile down upon us debut. These days part of the extended Orla Wren collective whose promised follow up to ‘the one two bird and the half horse’ we still await with baited breath (what do you mean its been out and gone already – there will be words), ‘Pi Magpie’ is a quite frankly wonderful 10 track suite that woos and coos with a serene nature bound beauty to playfully tap on the tree house door of Vernon Elliott. Both magical and enchanting, these wood carved treasures draw upon a deeply engaging water coloured pastoral palette where the easy ear tones of smouldered lounge electronics blissfully caress and rapture to the figurine florets of willowy wind orchestrations. ‘Pi Magpie’ is the soundtrack for fading summer nights, subtly speckled in exotica and garnished with an affecting minimalist persona that for the best part sounds as though it was crafted in an enchanted woodland. irrefutable dashed with a lost English eccentricity tracks like the loungey ‘part time blind’ nod to the stirring British magicalia so eloquently set to score by Douglas Gamley most notably his sound-scape for ‘spring and port wine’ and should ring an appreciable bell to those who regularly subscribe to the wares of such esteemed labels as trunk and finders keepers whilst the wintry tasked ‘for the song’ slyly shimmers around the Laurie Johnson note book like some distant cousin after glowing on the vibe of ‘the avengers’ albeit here re-tooled as were by L’Augmentation. Those enamoured of krautrockian dialects ought to shuffle at pace to ‘devil’s interval’ where the shimmying motorik rhythms are frantically found huffing and puffing to the watchful sirens of squirreling wind opines to come on like some mutant jitterbug penned by John Lurie amid an impish after hours drinking session with Cluster. ‘wearside ratcatchers’ admittedly caught our ear not least due to it being steeled in a mournful bitter sweet classical elegance framed in clock working chimes but because its dusted in the kind of Stereolab squiggles that longingly littered their ‘cobra and phases’ set. Somewhere else the lush sand stroked tropicalia of the lazy eyed ‘hosianna baft’ recalls the idle some starry eyed distant land drift of to shack highway’s debuting platter with its softly deflected off set funk mirages envisaging a lilting warmth and carefree nature something with which the parting ‘paking halos’ sees fitting to bottle up and set afoot to voyage off in to the milky distance with.
http://www.secondlanguagemusic.com