Reviews 080: Steven Legget
Steven Legget is one of those mildly frustrating cases of an artist with awe-inspiring musical vision and an almost nonexistent discography. Among the (literal) handful of releases from his decades long career, the Hizou single-sided 12” on Claremont 56 has always stood out most. It’s so amazing, all flowing strings and horizontal atmospheres, and my desire for more music in this wondrous style has finally been sated by Firecracker Recordings’ release of Bathhouse. This spellbinding 2xLP is the opus Legget’s scattered works have been hinting at, a towering beacon of neoclassical ambient perfection, turning emotional strings, blurry electronics, and alien dub textures into a meditative paean to the relaxing and nearly extinct pleasures of public bathhouses (specifically, the historic Turkish Baths of Newcastle).
Steven Legget - Bathhouse (Firecracker Recordings, 2018)
“Siga-Siga” sets the scene with lapping water and insect sounds, like a pre-dawn walk on the beach. The cricket chirps and waves are joined by faint electronic effects and melancholy piano as “Forte” comes to life, the playing soft as morning dew and under time-stretched delay...notes bouncing, morphing, and refracting. Aching layers of cello from Laura Reid swell in, swathing the ivory lullabies in a romantic sadness, with arcs of feedback and backwards delay fx coloring between the lines. In a similar mold is “Still”, as lo-fi rain falls alongside ambient drones growing in strength. There are subtle cerebral mixing and panning effects and more of Laura’s deep and serene cello emerges, weaving fantasias of classicism and Americana alongside high end vibrato tones, both watery and psychedelic.
One of the more compelling pieces on the album is “Low,” with heart-wrenching chamber strings locked into a long hypnotic phrase over phasing white noise, birdsong, and quite surprisingly, some heady dub rhythmics. The whole thing scans as Rhythm & Sound remixing Rachels, featuring pillowy synthbass and druggy riddims accented by alien cymbals and shakers, hallucinatory echoes, and sub-sonic kick drums. At times the beat backs away, allowing the strings to soar uninhibited, before it all lurches back into the off-kilter dubwise flow. “Swivel” also has a rhythmic pulse, this time generated by Laura’s plucked cello arpeggios under industrial delay fx. Her gentle melody is backgrounded by birdsong and metallic streaks of feedback, joined eventually by bowed strings and their springtide glow. It’s a vernal dance, swaying joyously through flowers and sunshine, as dubby kicks, sizzling noise, and flanged rattles flash through the air.
The C/D sides go without the cello of Laura Reid, allowing electronics and field recordings to dominate and weave together in strange patterns. This is most apparent in “Golden” and its mutating wall of noise. Twinkling metallic tremolo tones sound like church bells filtered through DMT, sitting atop amorphous swells, Suade Bergemann’s mesmerizing and physical sine bass, and murky overdriven keys. Mark Hand serves up smokey dreamtime euphoria on a Rhodes Stage 88, resulting in a captivating push/pull between lush midnight e-piano soloing and atmospheric drones that refuse to coalesce. We get another beat-led piece with “November”, as a massive four-four kick pattern marches through forest birds and blankets of calming synthesizer. The obvious sign post is Gas, with a simple propulsive rhythm overlaid by morphing and organic ambiance…the kind of kaleidoscopic sonic fog that transports you to fantasy worlds and unknown forests filled with mysterious energies.
“Bathhouse,” on the other hand, floats on layers of city sounds…traffic…highway drones…with more lapping water and clanging percussive fx doused in reverb. Cavernous bass pulses support barely there piano fragility, echoing and panning, with oscillating space noise circling all around. It’s somber heroin jazz overlaid with new age naturalism, the keys increasingly soaked in underwater vibrato effects, morphing from piano notes into percolating resonant bubbles. The crystal healing tones and flowing bass drones of “River” evoke overlapping liquid pools, dark colors mixing, haunted feedback escaping and swirling. It’s an ebb and flow of cloudy sonics, sometimes growing so loud as to drown out conscious thought, all becoming one with the glowing layers, like floating on an otherworldly river of healing and peace. The ritual ends with “Lakka” and cleansing ocean rebirth, with waves crashing to shore and the warmth of laughter and human presence.
(images from my personal copy)
