Chorusing

Chorusing mainman Matthew O’Connell has an illustrious background dabbling in electronics and engineering which includes working for Moog Music calibrating and building synthesisers, and testing vintage analogue delay chips by day. Allied to delving deeper into the world of mathematics in Budapest and becoming creatively embedded with the Kitchen Budapest —a collective of artists, theorists, and coders - this is arguably ‘the’ album of neuro-scientific music for beatific heart-thinkers. In fact Half Mirror’s cover bears a visual translation of its songs’ waveforms.

‘Half Mirror’ sees a melding and welding of ethereal electronica with the otherworldly atmospheres of felt/unfelt nature which when interpreted and translated render this ‘UFOlk’ or ‘extra-celestial’. The alien is within, without, all-around and waiting to be found in immediate and intermediate environments.

As the album title suggests, the visage of a half image or reflection/refraction proffers only a portion of the reality. The apparition of vision only a segment of what and who you are. Or appear to be.

O’Connell has now set these ideas, inspirations and image-in-ation- techniques to his aching, soothing, swooning vocals that at times recall Arthur Russell’s rarely restrained pain and John Martyn’s barely controlled vitriol. His hushed, unrushed utterings are informed by misremembered, half-forgotten recollections and memories, the shards, splinters and fragments of a past plundered for the present. A new iteration of history.

‘Cold’ and ‘Whitewaterside’ are sparse, string-driven, finger-pickin’ openings, the affects/effects illustrating that the spaces (in)between are places hitherto unforeseen.

‘Watching the beams’ finds O’Connell going past-oral and re-verbal, the sensory surround-sound of snatched glimpses of watched palimpsests. ‘Midday Sun’ is neither up nor down, here or there, idly and tidily awaiting its next move, waiting for the next groove.

This is a beguiling album that sits pretty in the inside lane in fourth gear, no need to rush, no need to push, simply cajoling and consoling the whole way.