Snow from Yesterday is a shimmering album release from the acclaimed Austrian composer Manu Delago, on which he has incorporated the sound of vocal ensemble Mad About Lemon into his sonic pallet. It is an absolute dream of a pairing, marrying the rich and ethereal innovations of Delago to a trio of female voices that bring a thread of pure, celestial and folksy feeling to this exquisitely crafted creation. As ever with Manu, the backbone of the music is his percussive playing of the handpans. They alone coat the sound with an icy momentum whilst floating off into the deepest, darkest reaches of the universe. It is easy to hear why this man’s CV includes collaborations with Bjork and Anoushka Shankar; his explorations avoid the predictable, and his melodic excursions have the happy knack of uncovering aged and timeless ornate patterns. This is music that can express the subject matter in sound alone. The unstoppable flow of environment and climate change is hard to ignore, the fragility of human life all too present in our thoughts, but comfort is offered in these whirling, swirling melodies too. In fact, the presence of trombones and bass trumpet on a piece like ‘Oxygen’ conjures echoes of the industrial age, evoking the beginnings of all those advancements that today seem at loggerheads with the care our planet is crying out for.
That collision is felt on the opening track ‘Modern People’, as the handpan chimes rise like mist from a river, the lyrics sing of a present-day populace and the spiritual, commercial, social, aspirational and leisure-related distractions that turn their heads away from natural wonder; “while they’re dreaming where the moon came from and how to time travel”. So, with this scene setter, we are launched on a dreamlike trek that casts an eye over life’s grandest peaks in tandem with some deeply personal brush strokes. The only voice heard in ‘Little Heritage’ is that of a newborn baby, whilst ‘Paintings On The Wall’ is a hymn in tribute to Manu’s late stepfather, written in the immediate aftermath of his passing and performed, with the same vocal ensemble as featured here, at the funeral. This does seem to encapsulate the message at the core of this expansive piece, that even when the times can feel overwhelmingly mournful, there is always hope to be found where there is life. And as Mad About Lemon sing while the closing title track flows downstream off into the distance, “it’s all snow from yesterday, we call it water under the bridge.”
With this mesmeric and fresh work, the listener is ushered into a sort of glacial antechamber. A place where the snow from yesterday has long gone, melted into water and not set to return any time soon. We are wrapped in this cool flowing ambience, a place where time stands still and natural beauty has the oxygen to breathe, but there are darker motions not too far away on the outside. Dissonant noises of the modern world penetrating the serenity but never wholly cracking it (just listen to those arch, metronomic vocals on ‘Stay Afloat’), the natural world and the modern technologically saturated one seem to rattle against each other just as hot and cold weather patterns create the rumble of thunder. Incredibly, this tension is maintained from start to finish in a song sequence that ebbs and flows in the most satisfyingly cohesive way. ‘Snow From Yesterday’ plays like an ode to the changing climate and uncertain times in which we exist in eleven singular movements that, brilliantly and emotively, never loses sight of the beauty present in these shifting situations as it holds a hopeful candle to the human spirit.
Bandcamp: https://manudelago.bandcamp.com/album/snow-from-yesterday