Collaborative duo featuring Gayle Brogan of Pefkin & Electroscope and Alan Davidson of Kitchen Cynics. This is their first album.
Review by Bliss (Kim Harten)
Barrett's Dottled Beauty is a new collaboration between Alan Davidson (Kitchen Cynics) and Gayle Brogan (Pefkin/Electroscope). The album contains two long tracks of experimental psychedelic folk, with main emphasis on the experimental. Eerie, abstract, and at times quite harsh sound effects, hypnotic drones, mindbending sound manipulation and pulsating electronics rub shoulders with delicate folky and medieval-tinged melodies and an echoey, atmospheric rendition of a John Clare poem in Featherless Fools, whilst Sunlight Bathed & Golden Glare (a play on Felt's Sunlight Bathed a Golden Glow perhaps?) brings the folk and psychedelic components further to the forefront whilst still retaining a meandering, abstract, experimental sensibility, creating an end result with much dreamlike, otherworldly beauty about it.
Review from The Sound Projector
Barrett’s Dottled Beauty is the Scots duo of Gayle Brogan and Alan Davidson. We noted them in 2017 with their Owls In Their Eyes album. Living For The Moment (LES ENFANTS DU PARADIDDLE ENF 109) takes their winning formula and extends it even further, in terms of duration, psychedelic excess, and hypnotic dream-like droneworthiness. On ‘Featherless Fools’, there’s 32 minutes of cosmic meandering to savour, where echoed instruments and fey vocalising are stewed in an endless brew of protean drone. Takes us back to the glory days of 2004 when this sort of thing was abundant on the Digitalis and Foxglove labels in America, but I like to think Gayle and Alan have their own unique folk-inflected slant on the genre. Anyone can make Cosmic Courier comparisons, but buried deep within the amorphous non-structure of ‘Featherless Fools’ nebulous clouds, I bet we can hear traditional Celtic pentatonic scales just waiting to resolve themselves. The second cut, ‘Sunlight Bathed & Golden Glare’ is more easy to accommodate on one side of an LP and is less “out there” than the main track; more easily identifiable guitar playing and vocals, instead of heavily treated alien sounds. It’s also as much a studio concoction as it is a performance; overdubs, backwards tapes, edits, layers. The music is drenched in light; it more than delivers on the promise of its title. Lovely collage cover for the CDR by Alan, as ever. When they do limited vinyl runs (100 copies) of their records, Alan prepares each single collage cover by hand; every release sold is an individual artwork.
credits
released March 7, 2016
Written by Gayle Brogan / Alan Davidson.
Recorded in Ayrshire and Aberdeen.
Features the poem "The Crow" by John Clare.
supported by 13 fans who also own “Living For The Moment”
Set your controls for the heart of the next closest sun that you can find. This is the soundtrack for transfiguration, divination and disintegration. You will absolutely lose yourself in this psychedelic eddy of drones, swoops, and other-worldly glister. Aurora Borealis is highly redolent of the closing credits for the classic TV show UFO, full of foreboding and a bubbling under the surface menace Paul Sands
supported by 10 fans who also own “Living For The Moment”
Ghostly violas and droning harmoniums adrift in a fathomless limbo...a somber experience, but strangely comforting, like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a gray autumn afternoon. neu-mann
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