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alistair crosbie: musicforshipwrecks

"Musicforshipwrecks" offers up four tracks of glowing, drifting, grand and harmonic laced ambience nd drone works. This is the third work in "Musicfor" series from Scottish born mood setter Alistair Crosbie; the other two volumes in the series are "Musicfordrowning" (Lefthand Pressings, 2006) and "Musicforlighthouses" (Quinquaginta, 2007).

The four tracks on offer here last between nearly twenty minutes and just shy of four minutes a piece, and each track nicely gives a drifting and slowly developing feeling of grandeur and harmonic richness as if your slowly drifting over the fallen ornate and majestic wonder of a once powerful and seemingly unsinkable ship.

With banks of multicolour fish weave in and out of the structure, and sunlight ever-so often catching the fallen grandeur of the wreck, yet there's also the odd hint of dark more murky drone undercurrents too suggesting the dark more sinister feel of shipwrecks.

Crosbie seems to be using a fairly simplistic, but never the less effective series of pulled-out synthesizer tones and guitar elements which he aptly manipulates into the tracks grand harmonic yet often watery drifting feel.

You can hear traces of Eno, as well as a few other ambient artists work through-out "Musicforshipwrecks", yet Crosbie adds enough of his own sonic flavour and dramatic ambient flare to make this more than just a simply rehash of ambient clichés.

[Roger Batty]