Beneath The Bark
Bamboo Stilts understand and recognize that, as soon as you turn your eyes to look under the lens of the microscope, another world comes to light. A thousand soft notes play out their lives in high definition and with an incredible amount of detail. Scuttling electronics and drones that fly from hive to hive are a part of the daily ritual. Beneath The Bark is a shrunken community consisting of grubs n’ shrubs. Its ambient woodland has for long centuries retained its natural beauty, despite the odd incursion of an electronic-based construction site. The rustling static finds a home beside the soft, clipped sound of a butterfly’s wings. Lush green tones, consumed by a furry moss, are hidden beneath fallen trees and ancient ferns. Inside the hollow trunks, they rustle and scurry on a thousand legs. Bamboo Stilts (Orla Wren & Leigh Toro) gently release their ambient music into the wild, but it’s not always safe and secure. Sharper electronics glint in the grass, eyes ablaze and incredibly focused, predator hunting prey.
Leafy steps lead to a decaying house with a broken look; an old legend once had it as home to a white witch. Electronic insects squirm and writhe among the branches in an experimental effort to escape from this part of the woods. A black crow claws at the music, ripping off its aesthetically pleasing wallpaper to reveal a nest of buzzing flies and a nest of static. This is what you’ll find living underneath the skin of the music. The static’s rapidly zipped back up, like a waterproof jacket on a rainy day. For the most part, the music remains coated in a kind of ambient amber, the atmosphere dripping with a thick sap as the notes are sporadically spread apart. A gently plucked acoustic guitar gives off a casual vibe, and it offers some shelter, too. Silence falls over the rest of the community as they stop to listen to the guitar’s song. Deeper tones permeate the soil, but the lighter ambient textures keep their head above ground. They swirl slowly, like an October mist. Oriental melodies snake their way around the music, tasting the air.
The chirps and chitters of the wildlife (the electronics) call out to one another, but they never give away their precise location. They conceal themselves deep within the green taints of the foliage, never wanting to emerge. The tones gradually become quieter, and by the final track they slip away as nothing but ghosts. This last excursion is a beautifully jaded piece, tired from its journey. It’s evocative of humid evenings, where the sun would at first glow a violently orange colour and then drift the sky into a purple coma.