This dark and contemplative work, inspired by the blazing spike of William Blake‘s Albion, is a haunting torchlit journey into some imagined underworld, something the opener “The Milk White Path” unloads in plentiful supply. That farm-gate creak, bathed in a slow dronic yearn, pitted in plunging bass. A see-sawing sapphire murkily caught in your mind’s eye, awash in purpling crescents and whistled otherness, as that subtle clang of maritime bell plunges the hue deeper.
Only four tracks in, and this is shaping up to be a great listen. Tim Hill conjures some vividly detailed atmospherics that your mind soaks right up, the menacing physicality of “Notes From Underground” involving additional zither from Jonathan Coleclough, a curdled chorus all om-shuttered meditative with a strange divinatory ache that bounces the walls like an unwelcome guest.
Seeing Tim ply his wares recently in a chapel in Reading was fascinating to witness, his compositional use of looped effects tangling up with his live playing, squeezing maximum drama out of the shapes he was welding, blurring couriers that elevate, latchkey you in there.
Whereas most musicians opt for layering things up, Tim prefers to nudge the narrative with suggestive shivers, shoot the sax’s sibilance with extra colour, infecting the space between with eerie atmospherics that wisp in and out. An attentive tilt the title track “Leviathan Whispers” noir-nylons brilliantly, grows and glistens in spooky cymbalised shiver and slumbering heartbeat enigmatically slithering the saxophone like a wounded shadow.
Partials that peel back the context to produce the light-absorbing ancientness of “Around My Shed They Began To Sing”, further enhanced by Colin Potter of Nurse With Wound fame. A braying bass ominously encircled in arrowing half-lights, that strained saxophone like a skulking sackcloth with bloodshot peepholes.“Ghost Horn” taking the inky shade of the previous to a looped piano fall, fractured melodics scissored in that deep bellow and contaminated under-creep. Tim’s ever-expanding palette finding new ways to get under your skin, the gurgling animalistic menace that’s called “Beasts Everywhere” pawing at your physique, suddenly shaking the speakers, periphery-prowling in lycan howls and disturbed warblings.
An excellently paced affair that inventively burns to its very end, a crooked slice of ambience named “After The Rain”. A final curtain call maybe referencing that decaying painting of Max Ernst‘s, sonically redistributed in a dirgey discolourment of spanning drone which skilfully holds your attention to its last flickering trickle.Leviathan Whispers is the perfect accompaniment to those long drawn-out winter nights ahead.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
