The Sights of the Drowned Fable CD ICR DISTRIBUTION

A CDR of his performance at the Resonator festival in July 2007.Members of the audience were seen to weep. **REVIEW FROM MUSIQUE MACHINE**I’m ashamed to admit this is the first of Colin Potter’s solo works I’ve heard, having been so familiar and fond of latter-day NWW- it’s nice to hear one of the masterminds behind some of those classic album sshowing he’s more than capable of crafting an focused, atmospheric, creative audio trip in it’s own right with The sights of the drowned fable. This is certainly more active/noisy than I expected, I guess I imagined Potters solo work to be quite ambient and drone based, & while those elements are present there’s much more to this than simple drone record. To highlight this point the 43 minute long piece that fills the disk opens with a electro chopping tone that’s joined by more hectic, rushing tones and pitches giving the piece a nice manic and slight slap-stick opening. As the piece progresses & the hectic pace lesson we drop into rich expansive and quite mysterious sound ambient revelations which Potter litters with bizarre electro rubs that could almost be alien voices trying to talk. The rest of the piece takes you on an often surprising sound journey with Potter keeping your attention through out; we drop into odd ominous & cryptic rhythmic patterns of clunking metal, typewriter sounds,to getting tangled in hallucinogenic tangles of weird mumbled voices that burst in sinister robotic vocalising, or just rising harmonic & edgy drone revolution’s with gong like tones entering here & there, building a great feeling of tension. The piece is taken from a live recording at Resonator festival from July 2007- so how much of this was planed or improvised is unclear but either way it’s highly enjoyable, atmospheric and progressive piece of sound art/ sound story telling. ROGER BATTY