Review | "Gilden Gate" by Gilroy Mere
An absolutely stunning release from a prolific genius
Lyrical and tender, the 11 instrumental meditations featured in “Gilden Gate” shape-shift between such elusive forms that it's a feat to accurately describe their delicate charms - from incidental soundtrack music to documentary background sounds, from jangly psychedelic folk to ghostly vocals and exotic effects.
The prolific Oliver Cherer is behind the Gilroy Mere moniker, and this record follows on from his other much-lauded Clay Pipe releases (The Green Line, Adlestrop, Over the Tracks, and Estuary English - last year’s collaboration with David Rothon).
According to the liner notes, Gilden Gate is “an album of two halves. Side 1: (‘Rising’) celebrates the sun-drenched beaches, pastures, and heaths of rural Suffolk, whereas Side 2: (‘Falling’) explores the underwater world of the lost city of Dunwich and its five church spires.”
In the words of the artist, Oliver Cherer:
“A few years ago I discovered the lost city of Dunwich. In the small museum there I learned that this tiny hamlet had once been a major medieval city of international trade.
It seems that over a period under the influence of the weather, natural erosion, and market rivalry the thriving harbor port was inundated by the North Sea and eventually slipped into and under it.
The city of churches was lost and all the spires engulfed and toppled. What remains are the few houses, and the ruin of Greyfriars crumbling inexorably down the cliff and exposing the bones of buried monks as the graveyard follows the building’s stones into the sea.
There are local legends surrounding the site including stories of fishermen hearing the bells of lost churches and seeing the ghostly, lighted city beneath their boats as they return to the shore.”
Almost imperceptibly sliding from luminous daydreaming to crepuscular melancholy, the record is rewardingly rich and sumptuously evocative: otherworldly choirs, rasping violins, swooning arpeggios and a delicate, lace-like complexity regarding both compositions and arrangements make for a heady atmosphere throughout, sometimes cinematic, often introspective, always ambiguously disposed between pensive and enchanting.
Either on its own, or as a culmination of several releases, “Gilden Gate” is an achievement worthy of note: consistent, coherent, and concrete, Cherer daringly proposes a radical reconfiguration of genres affiliated with sidelined, obscure, enchanting scenes, such as math rock, psychedelic folk and Eno-like artificial experiments in esoteric instrumental music.
Never contrived, always ornate, soothing but not soporific, humble yet ambitious, the entire Gilroy Mere project is a contemporary enunciation of all that is beautiful in the hothouse of independent music.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, January 2024