Review | “St Ann's” by David Boulter

The latest mesmerizing album by a master of atmospheric enchantment

Artwork by Clay Pipe Music label owner Frances Castle

David Boulter, acclaimed musician, prolific composer, and member of the legendary Tindersticks, presents us with yet another unmissable release on the consistently brilliant Clay Pipe Music label

This time it's an instrumental opus inspired by his childhood in suburban England, a soundtrack, or serenade, to personal history whose narrative arc begins with gray deprivation, is tempered by wide-eyed wonder, and continues its bittersweet existence after the discovery of beauty, perhaps in lost innocence accessed through retrospect, with a sub-plot giving side-glance towards the social redemption of post-war economic renewal and urbanization, pensive about the emotional finances of vanished but not inconsequential optimism.

More specifically, and according to the liner notes, this collection of 13 instrumentals is titled after the St Ann’s council estate in Nottingham, a place that shaped Boulter’s early life, in ways unexpectedly multifarious:

In his own words, "I was born in the old St Ann’s, famously depicted in the late 60s as some of England's poorest social housing. Crumbling, cramped, and damp, with shared backyard toilets and no bathrooms. Some houses lacked hot water, and winters were bitterly cold."

By the late 1960s, St. Ann's, like other city center areas, faced decay and was slated for demolition. 340 acres, including David's family's home, were cleared, and in 1970, Victorian streets gave way to a modern Radburn-style estate.

“We relocated to the new St Ann’s when I was six. There were now two indoor toilets! A bathroom with a gleaming white ceramic bath that you could fill anytime. Central heating, and small front and back gardens. We had our own shed, and a cherry blossom tree just beyond the fence. Life became vibrant.

This LP is a celebration of a community and streets that still hold a special place in my heart. I will always be from St Ann’s and St Ann’s will always be a part of me."

Opening with the sound of children at play, their audible smiles beaming a nursery rhyme, their resounding laughter providing a narrative context for the overlaid musical sketch made of echoing guitar strums, soft piano phrases, and quivering synth washes.

Conceptually, the album narrative revolves around nostalgic rumination, keeping constant throughout the same tender tonalities, adhering to a faux-naive simplicity that belies the inherently sophisticated chamber orchestra arrangements, their complexity resembling a miniature vibrating with intensely rendered detail.

The mood is simultaneously sincere in its forthrightness and playfully whimsical in its blissful sincerity, at once intentionally sentimental and rigorously restrained, oscillating gently between quaint charm and ethereal melancholy.

The melodic lines are austere yet not foreboding in their romantic purity, softly performed with a plethora of mostly analog instruments, a veritable orchestra including acoustic guitar, flute, viola, violin, double bass, vibraphone, tenor recorder, occasional synth pads, and modulated riffs, as well as sparse electronic percussion of variable affect.

The fragile accomplishments of this chamber ensemble are occasionally accompanied by wordless backing vocals whose elementary harmonies are reminiscent of school choirs.

These main elements, deceptively quiet yet very intricate, are further adorned with exotic decorative sounds and tintinnabulations emanating from playful chimes, vibraphones, xylophones, marxophones, and field recordings.

The overall feeling of the music is not a picturesquely nostalgic trip down memory lane, because it avoids the cliché of becoming a sonic illustration for a past era, and lacks direct samples and any other figurative gestures.

Rather, Boulter achieves a convincing version of authenticity by adhering to a creative process that does not resort to quoting the obvious semaphores of hauntological niches, such as borrowed dialogue, vintage TV show soundscapes, dated synth effects, or any direct invocation of retro library codes (modulated Moogs, swelling crescendos, sci-fi thematics, etc).

In other words, the carefully considered music is strikingly original yet richly evocative, its timelessness retaining a warm timbre throughout, settled in its languid tempo which adheres to a leisurely adagio pace whose stateliness makes the most out of an abundance of jewel-like details and delicate arrangements

Ultimately, the compositional structure remains consistent in its juxtaposition (and variegated consequences) of exuberantly innocent phrases riffing against the inherent restraint of repetitive patterns, like a slow arpeggio or simple chord progressions, compositional devices whose metronomic predictability marks the passage of time, altering reality itself by the very act of perverting the purity of recollection via the shifting of tonal scales, jumps from major to minor, their assured progress becoming spiritually uplifting, like a mantra, similarly offering the pacifying murmur of a consoling lullaby.

Thus creating a hypnotic effect by repeating the sweet yet laconic melodic riffs over varied ornate arrangements, the peace is interrupted but not disturbed, like the placid surface of a sonic lake rippling in circles when an incantation skips on its otherwise still facade, each minute sound ricocheting on the stillness of silence, leaving concentric traces in its wake, whose swelling diameters expand before they disappear once again into the sky reflected on the water, a form of persuasion whose strategy of recurrent assertions captures the tense mysticism of esoteric individuality as it is customized by environment, time and representation

It is a sound appropriate for the times when one is confronted with their past through the perspective of its historical sense, the visible before outlined today by the oddly shaped contours of our intimate impressions, themselves quasi-personal, semi-public, liminal, shaped by communal environments and random, uncontrollable circumstances, sometimes highly specific ones, like the aesthetics of our childhood homes and their sociopolitical implications, all of these being at once highly personalized configurations of a universal existential process of calibrating experience, both collective and individual, a human effort made to assign meaning to our life.

In this process of conversion of actual events to virtual symbolism, the local thought becomes a global act, while it's the concept of reality that emerges as the constant parameter unifying the imaginary with proof.

These short but solid pieces are free-standing monuments to the here and now, interventions liberated from institutional scripts, independently commemorating the existence of a sublime dimension, namely the perceptual mechanism activated by an adult who attempts to evaluate, appreciate, and contemplate, in the present, the outlines of persistent memories, revisiting time and space coordinates, assessing tonight the impact of yesterday.

In this sincere attempt at biographical manifestation, meditating at the crossroads of oblivion and stopping at the traffic lights of recollection, memoir is reconciled with history, biography with the novel, and essay with the poem, each form releasing its emotional weight, becoming an empty page moving outside the limits of trauma, flying across the borders separating idealization from evidence, rising above the event horizon, studying the archaeological sediment of our inner lives and the quirky aesthetics of our environmental locality, their fragments collapsed upon each other, becoming the unit of us, the collective consciousness and shared imagination which includes plenty of space for you and me.

The music of David Boulter raises a transparent flag through which the sky sheltering everyone and everything can be seen changing constantly, its endless variations and infinite expanse a mercurial manifestation of heavenly solace.

Childhood is the universal motherland.

Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, May 2024

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