Danny Clay

Ganymede

BY Eric HillPublished Feb 13, 2015

6
Melding together references, both direct and oblique, to Greek mythology, the poetry of Goethe, the music of Schubert and perhaps even Jupiter's largest moon, Danny Clay distils an album of cracked pastorals initially both dense and lovely. The opening six-track sequence titled "glow" resembles the bed track for one of Marsen Jules's swelling tidal themes, full of lazily left-handed piano and carrying a crate of glassy bells. "Im Morgenglanze," follows less beautifully with what sounds like the disassembled parts of a piano being dragged and/or stretched on some medieval rack.
 
On the closing title track, nearly half the album's duration, Clay combines his collection of musical and noise elements, resembling the hauntological experiments by the Caretaker, but stretched out and out and out (and out). While the scattering of sound has an unhurried and stoned logic that maintains sufficient coherence on the shorter pieces, these longer ones merely churn and churn, the elements only defined by transformation, never evolution.
(Hibernate)

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