Jon Brooks – How to Get to Spring (Clay Pipe Music)

Jon Brooks’s How to Get to Spring on Clay Pipe Music invites nature indoors with a set of beautifully necessary pastoral electronics

Windows have truly become portals in this upside down version of our world. For the most part, the act of looking out upon rather than going out amongst must suffice. Isolation is a physical requirement and anxiety feels like the default setting. Nature goes on of course and the seasons maintain their dance. That Jon Brooks chose to examine the shift between winter and spring across his fourth LP on Clay Pipe Music is a magical thing itself and would be a delight even during the best of times. But these are not the best of times. Under such revised conditions Brooks’s musical ruminations feel absolutely necessary. How to Get to Spring is a series of analogue electronic lifelines that charm, entangle the soul and create wonder in the listener. This is a record to embrace, for it offers much in the way of comfort.

Magic is apparent from the outset, with the pastoral electronics of “Fonn”. Its swirling repetitions feel as if they are rising into the air, like birds looking back upon where they were before charting a course to where they are going. Brooks crafts a degraded television theme and weaves it through the spiralling branches of the piece, which is another of his timeless classics. “A lesson on attachment” doesn’t let up. It drifts in with dreamy guitars before the drum programming goes off like stars in the night sky and a shimmering heart falls out of the darkness. That’s before a signature Jon Brooks hook glides through. If awakening in the middle of the night overheated and anxious then this, dear friends, might be the cure.

The fragility of winter is exposed to change, causing an ascending electronic reaction with “Dandelion clock”, as if Boards of Canada had embraced coldwave and gone wandering the earth. On “Neist point” the land aches and persons upon it cry out for something more. Dark dreams melt and time lapse photography of flowers sprouting from the earth plays out. The track has the scope and grandeur of Mogwai at their most magnificent and suggests that all nature documentaries in the future should be scored by Jon Brooks. Although the images and narration would have much to live up to, for Brooks seems to have captured essences of nature and presented them in more honest and charming ways than photographic means would be able to achieve.

“How to get to spring” is the passage out. Found bird song interacts with calming swathes of synth like sun dancing off the water or the way light cuts through trees. It speaks of wistfulness whilst forging ahead, Brooks’s light touch conveying the transformation inherent in nature. I’ve been finding solace in Alice Coltrane’s Lord of Lords in recent days and Jon Brooks also has the ability to take me beyond the confines of this situation. Listening to How to Get to Spring is like coming up for air.

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