Nest - Body Pilot 10"

Nest are amazing.

Their last album proper, "Retold" was probably my favourite album of 2010. Beautiful, suspended ambient music, but with a true heart of musicality underpinning the floating. The drift of events.

Rain and piano. A throb in your head and a rattle of the windows. Swelling strings ebb and flow. The moon shines brighter for an hour then fades away. You think about your partners; your family; the world. You think about your place in the world. Where you have been and where you are going.

A collaborative project featuring Serein label owner Huw Roberts, based in UK, and Otto A. Totland, one half of the Norwegian Deaf Center. There had to be a Scandinavian in there. The snow, the gales you can feel but can't hear. The isolation.

This recently released 10" fills me with a deep joy. It makes me think that there might be another album on the way. Get the first album here. Let it live with you for a while. I promise you you will return to it, time and again.

As this is a recent release and is still available, this link will only be live for a few days.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

Download.

Nest - Retold

I've been holding off on posting this one for so long. This is a truly special album which has seen me through a few difficult patches. Sublime and beautiful understated genius. Every single note seems to be perfectly placed. These guys know exactly what they are doing. You're going to love it, I promise you.

Retold is something of a masterpiece within its field. Even on early inspections this record excels on every level as a piece of cinematic, ambient contemporary classical composition. From the writing, performances and sparing arrangements right down to the deeply atmospheric production this is an album that followers of cinematic score-work/modern-classical music will absolutely relish, combining memorable deployments of both melody and texture with a kind of scrupulous minimalism that never overplays its hand. 'Lodge' serves as an apt introduction to the album, setting out with muffled, bell-like piano phrases, pining horns and the gentlest current of strings, but by the time we arrive at 'Marefjellet' the duo have really hit their stride, conjuring suspenseful, filmic passages populated by rhythmic keying figures, deep, bass-heavy harps and vintage-style electronic processing. At times it's as if you're listening to a cross between Biosphere's Insomnia soundtrack and his album, Shenzhou, and in terms of ambient music, that must surely be regarded as a compliment of the highest order. Elsewhere, more abstract pieces arrive with the likes of 'Trans Siberian', where the influence of sound collage takes hold: early outbreaks of wintry drone merge with passing locomotive sounds, before an evocative mixture of coarse, filtered strings, fractured piano and field recordings start to flow. The previously unreleased material on the disc proves to be more than up to the task of following up the earlier EP tracks: 'Wheatstone' is full of immaculately produced, aloof romanticism, while 'The Helwick' takes on a blizzard-like feel with its musty, Deathprod-like approach to engineering. Possibly the most extroverted of all the recordings here is 'Far From Land', a composition that's just achingly beautiful as it builds up to a choral midway point that's guaranteed to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention.

Although the CD is long since sold out, this is available as a DD, so I'm only going to keep it up for a few days. Don't miss out.

320 Kbps.

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