So much contemporary music comes from a guitar base that it is both rare and refreshing when a different instrument is the starting point for a modern sound. With On The Line, the new four-song EP from August Cooke, the cello is the musical heart of the quartet of sounds found here, and without the proper language to explain why I love this fact so much, it’s because I have always loved music built on the horizontal sweep of strings rather than the vertical chop of the guitar sound. (Hey, I’m not a musicologist; I might not have explained that well, but I know what I like.)
The title track eases us in: a blend of echoing strings and hazy harmonies, more sketch than melody, but one that gradually colours itself in as the song progresses, running from fractured fascination to gossamer grace in under three minutes.
‘Mountain Down’ heads into more recognisably song-form territory; digital beats drive waves of electronica and elegance, bowed beauty and a vocal texture that is as much about communication as it is voice as instrument. There is also something of Talking Heads at their most worldly, the same tribal groove, emotive percussion-driven melodies and raw guitars balancing out a lush sense of understatement… if indeed understatement can be lush?
‘Nila’ is similarly beguiling and otherworldly, cinematic, and not quite of the Western musical canon, and ‘Gasoline,’ which rounds the EP off, is as much about atmosphere and distant, half-heard sounds as it is strange string inclusions and flamenco claps, pizzicato pluck, and shimmering sonic sensations. Hey, you get to a point when you have to say, stop reading my clumsy descriptions and just play the damn record…it’s the only way to make sense of it’s unique arrays.
This is the sound of the experimental post-classical world: a fractured dream-pop soundscape that is warm and weird (a word that originally means unplanned, free and magical in nature) and welcoming and wandering, the sound of sonic ideas flitting by while melodies tether the songs to the real world. Filmic and finessed, experimental yet easily accessible, explorative and musically eloquent, hushed, hazy and harmonious, On The Line is all of these things and so much more.
