Reviews
March: 18 albums you need to hear this month
Daniel Avery, Moby, D Double E and more
Nightports w/ Matthew Bourne 'Nightports w/Matthew Bourne' (The Leaf Label)
The music Matthew Bourne makes lies somewhere between the ambient jazz of Harold Budd, Erik Satie’s classical compositions and Hauschka’s prepared piano pieces. Here, he’s joined by fellow Yorkshire-based musician/producers Adam Martin and Mark Slater: they utilise a legion of pianos, from uprights to grands to pianofortes, and then set about manipulating, screwing and layering them into different shapes. The harsh percussive attack and malevolent rhythms swarming up on ‘Exit’ don’t sound much like pianos, but they are. A different mood haunts ‘Window’, its subtle phrasings fluttering in the air like silk sheets in the breeze, while ‘Annie’ is hewn from fidgety fragments of sound. Stephen Worthy
8/10
