It really does feel like I need this sort of music right now when the world seems to be losing its marbles. Tom Honey has, as Good Weather for an Airstrike, been producing some of the most thoughtful and absorbing music for some while, and each time he kindly shares some with me, it is a real pleasure. This latest set of five related tracks only clocks in at 18 minutes, but together they make a short sweet/suite that fully makes sense both as individual tracks and as a collective.
The tracks relate to the specific oceanic depth zones (who knew there was such a thing?), starting at the zone closest to the surface and going ever deeper down; sunlight , twilight midnight, abyss and trenches. Accordingly the music becomes more shadowing and enveloping as it progresses, breathy and ethereal, electronic echoes of deep water animals, rising and falling with the underwater currents.
The effects are hypnotic and calming (I need a bit of that!) and as it plays around me whilst I work on something or other, it has a similar effect to that induced by Max Richters epic Sleep work. Zones feels like another step forward for GWFAA, but then again each thing he releases feels like a step forward, building an ever growing catalogue of music with a character all of its own. GWFAA are out and about for a wee tour shortly (dates can be found on the Bandcamp site) so roll along to see what this sounds like in the ‘flesh’.
I am tired and irritated by what feels like constant exhortations from people who patently don’t know or care about me trying to wring the last drop of something from me, emails with headers like, ‘Hey Robert, can we please reconnect?’ No, no we can’t, I don’t know you and never will. More communications channels often just mean more disappointment.
This popped into view today, a day of some silent sadness, when Say Goodbye is a very appropriate thing to say.
Scotts music has been a thread woven through my last eleven years or so, since I first heard him at the end of 2006 and played the first album to pieces over a summer in France. His remarkable voice, his playing and the quality of his songwriting have remained a music refuge, a haven in these uncertain times.
Something in Ross Wilson’s music touches me quite deeply, and often when that sort of thing happens, it’s hard to put your finger quite on the reason why – is the musicianship? the deftly written songs of loss and longing? the melancholia that runs through even the most positive of his songs? the beguiling and effortless voice? All of these and yet something else. Maybe for me the call to my Caledonian roots, a nostalgia for a scarce remembered past. But more than all of this, the honesty, the lack of guile with no quarter given to fad or fashion… the integrity of a man and his music.
The new album, 
Each on this list is simply offered with the briefest of notes, and listed according to alphabetti spaghetti rules.
I really have no idea why it has taken quite so long to get around to making some jottings on this latest offering from Chicago based 
It feels like an age that I have been a fan of Tom Honey in his guise as 
Music matters. It matters to many of us in ways we find hard to express. In these days of perma-music spat out by faceless ‘artists’, dribbling from every lift, eatery, bank and other public place, it is easy to develop musical indigestion, a gut full of insubstantial and confected ‘product’. It’s easy to slide into that lazy assumption that music isn’t what it used to be, to shrug and accept that mid-tempo, mid-range and middle-of-the-road is all we should expect. But for anyone with an ounce (or should than be ‘gram’) of interest and energy, music is still oddly alive and well, uplifting, absorbing, challenging, enriching and beguiling.
The "Music Always Gives Me A Lift" Blog 