Angelmark

Michael Turner is a member of Titania and Uncertain Futures is his second solo album under the Angelmark name. The snowy cover snapshot, likely of somewhere nearby his Edmonton home base, is a thousand-word clue to the music’s hushed atmosphere. Instrumental guitar layers processed through flanged and shimmering filters suggest the cold and sparkle of fresh backwoods powder. Turner’s stated desire "…to invoke or recreate the feeling of places visited… long ago” is also represented in the gauzy audio equivalent of television’s flashback/dream sequence effects. A problem in communication of this stems from a contextual absence in our travels backwards. The two opening tracks nicely approximate the stillness of faded photography, but without any focal point the imagery dissolves into undifferentiated colour. Bright xylophone and metallophone notes on "Wintermute” introduce an element that engages the rest of the stacked guitar theme, solving the problem of washing out. Overall the album is a pleasant stroll down someone else’s memory lane, but could use a little more variation and detail to avoid dissolution into the music of interludes.