Helen Svoboda‘s latest is in the lost tradition of album as journey. Announcing itself like glaring daybreak, it pulls you down into the depths of its own nocturnal dreamworld, one of dusky beauty and clammy tension.
This shift is skilfully done, the album’s opening third slowly shifting from the gently off-centre but relatively linear ‘If’ and ‘Child’ into something more sunken and strange, the album’s final stretch forming an almost uncomfortably raw three-part howl of dissonance.
Svoboda has created an interesting sound world, one of spartanly recorded bowed double bass pushed into the panicky clamour of nightmares, as on ‘Solo’, or soothing, as it is on the swooning ‘Chords’. That said, as the album…