Review | “Hearing the Water before Seeing the Falls” by Andrew Wasylyk

The soundtrack of an eternal return to auditory pleasure par excelsis

Echoes of a half-remembered past drift through yet another masterpiece by a great talent defining the musical standard of today.

Refined and reflective in the most sensual manner, “Hearing the Water Before Seeing the Falls”, released in 2022, is an adult affair bursting with existential longing, seductive chords, and attenuated feelings of emotional intensity.

Such is the finesse of each track that one is tempted to suppose that the composer has grown up on a steady diet of the most elegant after-hours '90s soulful ambient funk, devouring everything by Steve Cobby or anything on Pork Recordings, his fine education filtered through the hazy melancholia of Bohren und der Club of Gore, or even visited by the ghosts of Miles Davis, the entire melange of after-midnight reverie ultimately remixed by Kid Loco (or The Irresistible Force?) for some obscure yet essential home listening chill-out compilation.

The entire LP is beautifully and generously orchestrated: muted trumpets, French horns, and somber saxophones take center stage on the 16-minute epic opener, while on other tracks tremulous background soundscapes veer from exotic percussion to cascading piano arpeggios; the titles invoke obscure botanological references placed in the context of a magic garden, inspiring a literary imaginarium, further augmented with nautical (folk?) lore and spoken word passages.

Listening to such overwhelmingly beautiful music one is enveloped in a sense of self-contained bliss bordering on solipsistic absorption, the experience becoming one of total space-time obliteration, instigating a continuous present crashing on the shores of consecutive Fridays, interrupting Saturdays against the traffic.

The Clay Pipe Music label and its entire roster, of which Wasylyk is a prominent member, can indeed be defined as a cohesive movement, a specific scene, an unprecedented proposal that defines our musical era as one of fertile creativity and impressive sophistication.

It's revolutionary music by and for aesthetic dissidents and artistic refugees, capturing its potentially huge audience one listener at a time, evolving its statement far away from algorithmic predictability, proudly isolated from the mainstream, producing a soundtrack that formulates the confident assertion of an entirely new sensibility.

Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, February 2024