Although on the face of it, Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On is a head-on collision between Andrew Wasylyk’s downbeat neoclassical folktronica and Tommy Perman’s post-club, percussion-heavy ambient constructions, under the surface there is the faint but delicious hint of the golden age of avant-garde music. The two Scottish musicians created the album on principles inspired by the Fluxus group of experimental artists and musicians: Perman sent Wasylyk three envelopes on which were written ‘Recording Instructions’, ‘Tempo Cards’ and ‘Chord Cards’, and the project grew out of Wasylyk’s interpretation of their contents.
But despite this appeal to chance, the finished product sounds anything but chaotic. These ten tracks are characterised by Wasylyk’s meditative piano refrains, by sweeping synths that owe a debt to new age and Japanese ambient, and by Perman’s organic approach to piecing together a musical collage. But more elementally than that, they are defined by their stillness and their sense of space. Opening track Climb Like a Floating Vapour begins with softly padding percussion, rich chords and a delicate melody. More mysterious, nebulous elements creep in, but they don’t disturb the almost otherworldly calm. Even as the beats become more noticeable, more intense, they are hypnotic rather than rousing.
Most of the individual pieces are between three and four minutes long, a fact that contributes to the album’s feeling of symmetry, its undoubted poise. Communal Imagination, for example, feels like an entirely self-contained world lodged in a nest of other such worlds. And although each track has its own distinct feel, certain elements – muted brass, the catlike advance of the percussive beats – bleed over into other corners.
Root Grow Emerge has a chiming background and a short, sampled vocal that seems to comment on its own repetitive nature. The Unbearable Sound of the Roses is an impossibly finely-wrought filigree of piano that somehow seems to be both still and in motion at once. Spec Of Dust Becomes a Beam marries squelchy synths to minimalist keys and a sampled choir with results which could be described as ‘acid classical’. There is a certain amount of grandeur here, but it is grandeur on a microcosmic level, like seeing dewdrops or blades of grass from the perspective of a termite.
As well as playing with the ideas of motion and stillness, Perman and Wasylyk also seek to disrupt conventional notions of time. Throughout the album they subtly splice disparate elements together in a way that is just incongruous enough to be uncanny without upsetting the overarching tranquillity of the music. This is most evident in Remain in Memory Full of Light, where space-age synths, disembodied voices and neoclassical piano motifs combine to beautiful but disconcerting effect. The title track rings with an eerie nostalgia, provided by Wasylyk’s intentionally wobbly melody combined with a comforting pillow of softened brass. The final song, Be The Hammer, moves furthest away from the template. Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat provides a typically world-weary, lyrically smart lead vocal, which becomes a kind of mission statement for the album, and for the kind of outsider experimentalism that birthed it.
Wasylyk and Perman have both been stalwarts of the Scottish music scene for a while now and given their shared interests and their history of working together on other projects, it seems surprising that this is their first full-length collaboration as a duo. But given how effectively Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On combines warmth of spirit with a genuine flair for exploratory sounds, it would be no surprise at all – and an absolute joy – to see them continuing their work as a duo.
Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On (30th August 2024) Clay Pipe Music
Bandcamp: https://claypipemusic.bandcamp.com/album/ash-grey-and-the-gull-glides-on