The modestly titled ‘Edition 1’ is the result of an intriguing and exciting collaboration between Christian Fennesz, who often deals in studied ambience, and King Midas Sound, who are Kevin Martin and vocalists Roger Robinson and Kiki Hitomi. Martin himself has shown, even in some of the more acidic stuff he has recorded as The Bug, that he can work with spaced out material and hazy textures, and that’s what we get a lot of here in a record that works beautifully on headphones, often with very few beats. It is essentially a slow moving, melancholic record but it is far from depressing, as ‘On My Mind’, ‘Melt’ and ‘Above Water’, for example, offer mysterious moments of calculated beauty, suddenly drawing focus from this essentially blurred music. Another three collaborations are due in this series, so if the success of the Fennesz work is anything to go by, they’ll all be worth acquiring.
4 out of 5
Reviewed by Ben Hogwood
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