Andrew Wasylyk - Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation (Athens of the North)

Andrew Wasylyk’s Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation is another visionary record with plenty room to dream

Memories walk with dreams. One moment I’m wandering through the Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden in St Ives, the next a school friend is telling me about his sister being saved from drowning by a figure who wasn’t there. At the same time I’m rubbing pastels into heavy stock paper, attempting a still life but finding it ever more abstracted on the page. Three not-quite-events separated by years, sifted through a fine gauze and thus given fleeting life through the listening of an album. For Andrew Wasylyk’s Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation is the sort of record that has the ability to slip inside the present and disrupt the flow of time.

This is the third in a sequence of works from Wasylyk, following in the footsteps of Themes for Buildings and Spaces (2017) and last year’s The Paralian. The thematic content of each is subtly but powerfully communicated, analogous to experiencing certain landscapes. For these are musical explorations of place that dig deep and unearth much in the process. Multi-instrumentalist Wasylyk has that rare ability to communicate his personal vision with great clarity via primarily instrumental music. Though significantly, he also allows plenty room for listeners to dream their own dreams between the lines he has drawn. It isn’t a cinematic effect as such, but consider the somnambulist passages of Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart follows Kim Novak through the streets of San Francisco to Bernard Herrmann’s mesmerising score. There’s room to dream within those scenes, just as there is in Wasylyk’s music. That is certainly true of Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation – and its series of painterly compositions – which navigates outsider waters also currently populated by the likes of The Pastels, Tenniscoats and Clay Pipe Music.

The contemplative piano and strings of enlightenment on opener “A Further Look at Loss” brings to mind David Axelrod, and the comparison favourably carries on throughout the LP, with Wasylyk a fellow traveller of the great maverick producer. “Last Sunbeams of Childhood” might lean more into jazz than anything on Clay Pipe Music, but it nevertheless has a kinship with recent pieces by Vic Mars and Gilroy Mere, particularly in its simultaneous presentation and avoidance of nostalgia. Meanwhile, the night time jazz and breezy harps of “Fugitive Light Restless Water” suggests summers by the loch listening to Alice Coltrane and thinking about the world outside. The suggestion of an out of reach passing train on “Everywhere Something Sublime” recalls pages from a Shaun Tan picture book whereas the relatively jaunty “In Balgay Silhouettes” is as spookily catchy as it is exquisitely outsider, Morricone by way of Money Mark if you like. “Awoke in the Early Days of a Better World” feels like a mural come to life or else the theme to a weirdo 1960s European love story given a Bill Wells makeover with International Airport as the backing band. The understated George Delerue sweep of “Black Bay Dream Minor” dials the mood back, evoking the sadness inherent in hopes and dreams of the future.

Andrew Wasylyk’s The Paralian remains one of my favourite albums of recent years and it is a pleasure to report that Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation joins its predecessor in my personal regard. The Paralian’s roots in an arts centre residency and the subsequent psychogeographic interrogation of the surrounding landscape by the sea lent it a substantial conceptual framework, which I felt a personal connection to. Although in part a response to the earlier work, Fugitive Light is if anything a little freer in its thematic structure, more open to the moment. Both records are thus marvels in their own unique ways while also maintaining intriguing connectivity. I look forward to discovering how these works will speak to me and each other in the years to come.

Monorail exclusive edition (signed and numbered with bonus CD)

Andrew Wasylyk Bandcamp