Diamond Mine by King Creosote & Jon Hopkins
LABEL: Domino

Certain musical moods will always prove endlessly compelling to me, so much so that I could be called biased. One of these is graceful reticence. This is the prevailing mood on King Creosote’s (aka, Kenny Anderson) newest offering, Diamond Mine, a collaboration with electronic musician Jon Hopkins, who among other projects was co-writer and co-performer on Eno’s wonderful, wandering Small Craft on a Milk Sea. Now, speaking of graceful reticence, I should probably take my own advice in advance before I gush so hard I spill on myself, but I don’t think I will. I love this release too much. I love the experience of trying to crack it open—have you ever tried to crack open air?

This release has been seven years in the making—Kenny and Jon curated from the King Creosote back catalog, reworking their selections. I, for one, am glad that the artists took their time—maybe each song took a year to make! It pays off in the restraint this album exhibits, the intense emotion expressed quietly, like the sun behind a cloud. Opener “First Watch” contextualizes things for us, the clattering cutlery and casual conversation revealing the physical and emotional location to be a small working-class village in Scotland. The introduction of a piano signals a shift from a purely-physical place to a more mental one combining visceral experience and sensation with more abstract memory and emotion—an idealized version of the real, a dreamplace which both is and is not. From this sparse introductory track, which transitions seamlessly into “John Taylor’s First Month Away,” we become aware of each musician’s role, the simple glimmer of Kenny’s plaintive, ephemeral folk either anchored to the dirt or launched into the sky by Jon Hopkins’ field recordings and frail electronic textures.

  King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Bubble by DominoRecordCo

Consider, for example, the climax of “John Taylor’s Month Away,” as the concertina and acoustic guitar are joined by a whirring buzz and a hazy wash of voices which return in the ambient outro. He says of a group of sailors: “A month at sea/ and then they’ll surely sleep/ with their heads still stuck on land,” a manifestation of the album’s occupying an intermediate space, between sea and land, between reality and fantasy. And in a certain sense the music means to tell us that we all must necessarily occupy this space; neither dream nor reality are enough by themselves. Indeed, the final two minutes almost sound as if the song has been washed away, or as if it’s the ocean itself, gulls punctuating the swelling waters of the dream. Brilliantly, many of the song’s constituent sounds appear in the first minute of the song, fading as the mournful overtones of Kenny’s pure voice ring out.

It doesn’t make sense to talk about individual songs with this release. It’s so much more. What captivates me so much here? How can I express the feeling which burgeons when the Mum-like blips and accordion drones of “Bubble” are completed by the sunny plucking of a banjo, the track on the album which most miscegenates the electronic with the acoustic? How can I even name it as one feeling? I witness it transform along with the music, “Bubble” giving way to two primarily-acoustic tracks. Is it the collision of the quotidian with quintessence, the expression of dreams too big for their vessels, emphasizing the fragility of this music? It could be the simultaneously spare and lush texture of the moods, like the introduction of a female backing singer (she stays for the duration) on “Bats in the Attic.” Like the village and the mental impressions that this album seeks to evoke, the music here contains multitudes in its tiny perfection. It expresses opposites, it is at the same time incredibly complicated but barely there. It’s an endless question, the answer of which is the asking itself.

I don’t recommend this release, I implore it.


REVIEWED BY MANUEL ABREU
MANUEL’S FAVORITE TRACKS: “John Taylor’s Month Away” • “Bubble” • “Your Young Voice”