Taking The Veil
A formative part of reinventing past tropes, especially when it comes to classical music, is in some way pinnacled by the override of deluge effects into something ornately archaic. In other words, refrains do less refraining, pizzicato does less pizza express, staccato stutters to a standstill. And then the reinvention starts, as shown here by Kitchen label’s Hior Chronik.
With a ballsy finish and ability as such with the classical instrument processing – strings, piano, electronic beats and field recordings – fellow artist friends including Sophie Hutchings, Field Rotation, Yahushi Yoshida (Secret Figure LP, 2009), paint with thick tonal oils in texture and finish, a swirling cream pie of fluffy cloud atmospherics with an absorbent centre.
Despite the recession of sonic offense, and indeed a lack of curt disharmony, the pieces flow in less preordained simplicity than one may textually and sonically first lead to suggest. A key success trope of ‘Taking The Veil’, like the David Sylvian track of the same name, is to voice a kind of objective musical absolute. This complicity with classical tension and release, and an aesthetically pleasing tonal veneer, bubbles blues purples and reds into something alike of Monet music: strong yet fragile, clustered yet diametrically expansive.
The opening “London Bridges (Falling Down) exemplifies the topsy-turvy trajectory of much of the best material, guided by gliding piano lines, an albatross across the constant stream. It sounds equally endangered, too. That’s where strings come in to sedate into a aposite parallel of melody – take “Nest Of Autumn” with it’s whirling A minor and augmented 4ths. Without the couplet counterpoint the sound would untie like frozen prose.
The whole reason this album works well rather than falling down at the first clichéd piano music hurdle is the voluminous scope and plenitude of wheat snipered scoop in terms of instrumental levity. It’s only Kafka-esque (an unfinished story) in it’s dream-dialectic nature. I reckon Hior Chronik has nailed the fourth quarter of argument here: time, augmented by notions of past, present and future. The Veil is taken by time, not by temporality. This quixotic statement of matter, whether sonic, amusical or vocal, doesn’t fall “flat on face”. It is about temperance, about solitude, about this is time to take the Veil, into the place of eternity.