Grasscut

There weren’t many lovelier records released last year than Grasscut’s Everyone Was A Bird. As with their earlier albums, it evoked the gentle beauty of the British countryside through electronic pastoral vignettes.

Much of this self-curated collection of remixes strikes a similarly contemplative mood. The trick with this kind of thing is always to compliment, not overshadow. So Adrian Crowley’s stripped out take on Snowdon makes even more of the grand stillness within the original and a reworking of Halflife by Mira Calix twists it into a weird, acoustic, gothic nightmare.

That’s a vibe partly explored by Fink with Islander, where he straps on a hulking, cavernous monotone bass, the percussion of the original now morphing into some ethereal maritime clank, like a ghost ship adrift. An album best digested when skies are gun metal.