Travelling Circuits

by

Web Rumors

My close friends know I'm often a bit critical of "constraint breeds creativity" as a concept — in the mouths of executives, it often justifies keeping artists poor. But Travelling Circuits feels like an exploration of the concept at its purest: created during a music residency in the New Forest region of England, all of its tracks are explorations of British folk music via shimmering 80s-esque synths. Each treatment of the seven folk melodies (and one original folk song?) leaves me wondering why no one has done this before. But perhaps they have: albeit a completely different genre and palette of sounds, the closest cousin to this album I can think of is René Werneer's Ecoutez Tous Pauvres Et Riches, a spiraling, proggy journey through folk and classical. It's okay to be formulaic if your formula is this good, and your execution this precise.