Review | “Yarmouth” + “Twelve Bells For Libuše” + “Factory” + “Lover's Walk (Instrumentals)” by David Boulter
A solo flight by an accomplished pilot: an introduction to the fascinating music of David Boulter
As a member of Tindersticks, the storied ensemble that has steadily been releasing after-hours gems of softly rocking perfection since the early '90s, David L Boulter comes with a prestigious pedigree of unassailable taste.
His own solo projects richly deserve any discerning listener's attention.
As an introductory opus, “Yarmouth” is a brilliant LP released back in 2020 whose gentle instrumental lyricism is further explored by “Twelve Bells For Libuše” and “Factory”, two EPs released in 2021 and 2023 respectively, all three on the brilliant Clay Pipe Music Records label.
Differing substantially in terms of mood and intention, these delicate acoustic records manage to succeed each other cohesively in the same space of stylized chamber music, neoclassical reverie, psychedelic folk, and recherché eclecticism. I suggest one listens to all three continuously in their chronological order. Their entrancing effect is cumulative.
All three carry a particular signature, resembling each other, and are recognizably similar in terms of sonic aesthetics, if not in terms of narrative: a gentle pastoral mood unites all three releases, a theme continued with their successor, “Lover's Walk” (Instrumentals), which is Boulter's 2022 release, meant as a companion piece to his spoken word opus of the same name.
Distilling the nocturnal intimacy and introspective mood of his widely known group work with the tindersticks, the gentle soundscapes arranged by Boulter often capture fickle adumbrations and iridescent hues of palpable emotion, their poignancy reflecting on the changing and elusive essence of tender rumination, the melodic compositions concocting an odd diversity of misery and joy.
Vocals are kept to a minimum overall, incidentally appearing as a ghostly choir or a wordless hum, while instrumentation remains consistently baroque in its refined abundance of decorative tonalities, featuring French horns, flutes, strings, and elegant touches of warm, synthetic pulses, always placed with care and sonic sophistication.
David Boulter is a master of pointillist precision, his small gestures seemingly random in themselves yet very calculated as a whole, each apparently independent brushstroke adding another tone in succession to its adjacent singularities, their relationship attaining full meaning only as part of a simultaneous totality.
A mighty trick is thus achieved when the listener is at a remove, making distance a prerequisite of image recognition: up-close, like a Seurat painting, this music is a mosaic of seemingly unrelated fragments: and yet, in their mesmerizing aggregate, these small marks put together create an unexpectedly detailed and evocative panorama, a sonic hybrid of spectacular appearance made possible only by the lack of precise outlines: a misty blur, an abstract sentiment, a mixed emotion, answers found in questions.
Consistently manifesting an enveloping continuum of evocative nocturnal beauty, these records stress their after-midnight context because they are works in my favorite genre, nocturnes, kleine Nachtmusik, music ideal for solitary listening at night, whose darkness falls equally softly upon the living and the dead.
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, January 2024