Review of For Myria [12k1043]

The Wire (UK)

This is the second album by Sheffield’s Jodi Cave and it’s an unassuming, sweetly desultory collection of pieces, in which field recordings and natural instruments are threaded together by computer processing. Cave started life as a clarinettist and he plays that instrument, plus harmonium and guitar alongside various close-miked objects, which could be marbles, stones, or bits of flint, pottering around in the mix. In its inconsequential absorption, it suggests a man engrossed in some hobby of a late afternoon as the light fades, whittling, rattling, sharpening and polishing various cherished bits and bobs on a workshop in a shed. There’s a sense that, rather than create some ridigly girded technological structure in which to house all of these objects and elements, he’s let them roll around as they please, finding their own place and direction. The Myria of the title, it seems, is not a female – Cave gives the air of being far too preoccupied with music to have time for that sort of thing – but a vague intimation of the colour yellow. – David Stubbs

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