Aidan O'Rourke
Album: Music For Exhibition & Film (EP Series 1.0)
Label: Reveal
Tracks: 4
Website: http://www.aidanorourke.net

This latest release finds the restlessly inventive Aidan continuing to mine the creative vein of his earlier project Hotline, whose musical and stylistic foundations were laid back in 2013. It's not easy listening, and newcomers would probably be better advised to start with Hotline as a more accessible, if still uncompromisingly innovative, exploratory exercise. For this new EP finds Aidan inhabiting a musical territory even further removed than the groundbreaking Lau trio from the loosely-folk genre in which he originally made his reputation. The EP's first track features contributions from John Blease (drums, percussion) and Graeme Stephen (guitars), with an underground bass and electronica setting that gives the piece something of the air of a latter-day Terry Riley. This is unarguably the disc's least accessible track, and on initial playthroughs will doubtless come across as slightly impenetrable even: it links with the second track Immersion, together forming a work commissioned by Scottish environmental artists Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion for their installation of that name.

The opening Tumadh is a lengthy (15-minute) tone-poem laden with highly subliminal riffs that are not always easy to divine; the word's literal meaning of "diving or plunging" is well realised in this rambling, slightly claustrophobic slice of musique-noir. Immersion, its 4-minute appendage, seems a comparative doodle from the same sketchpad, and consequently is less satisfying, even on the level of cautious-ambient that it invokes. Moving on, the EP's central 11-minute epic, the intriguingly titled Infuse My Eyes With Molten Grey Skies, could probably be gauged a more rewarding experience; it gives due prominence to Aidan's storm-tossed fiddle playing in a series of floridly cascading arabesques that are electronically treated (albeit sensitively) with various loops and reverb and other effects, to conjure what I'd term a kind of Lark-Ascending for the 21st century (roll over, Vaughan Williams?!) crossed with the spiritualism of John Tavener.

It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that the piece takes its inspiration from philosopher David Abram's cosmological treatise Becoming Animal - as does the disc's final track, Feel The Pulse Of This Place, whose ominous pulsating tread forms a weirdly logical, if primal travelling companion for Aidan's fiddle. This EP is an arty product, and one which fair demands to be taken seriously, but its sounds are still not without both excitement and charm, and undeniable aural stimulation.

David Kidman