Instrumental music is an often misunderstood form. Many see it as just music without words, as incidental sounds or background cinematic sonics, somehow lesser than its lyrically led, and let’s not forget, younger sibling. But if such people don’t hear the music communicating with them, that is because they have forgotten how to listen, not because the music doesn’t know how to speak. You Are Here, the second album from Myles Cochran again speaks volumes.
Instrumental music such as this talks to us through more subtle methods than the demonstrably limited lyrical form. If the latter uses its words to lead us to the exact conclusion that the writer intends, an artist as deft as Myles creates moods and feelings with his music, which in turn makes us feel and make us think -though the thoughts and conclusions we arrive at have as much to do with ourselves as the music before us.
And again, given that he is a man with a foot in two worlds, that of his US home and the UK, three if you count the Irish environs of his regular collaborator singer and harpist, Bróna McVittie, the result is an album of soundscapes. Soundscapes that take in the big skies of his homeland as well as the more pastoral places of England’s green and pleasant land but also the wildness of the Celtic shore, which he does through gorgeous blends of acoustic mastery and shimmering electric guitar sonics, rootsy twangs and drifting electronica, jazz ornateness, and folk finesse.
If previous album, Unsung, got the name Myles Cochran noticed as a musician to keep and close eye on, You Are Here, will be the album that marks him out as one of the finest guitar innovators currently working in the UK.
