Reviews
"...the pianist Hume and the drummer May create a beguiling soundscape whose delicate shifts of mood and texture are simple but extraordinarily effective. ..."
"...The minimalist romanticism is omnipresent.."
Avant Music News
Phil Johnson The Independent
"..Landscapes of extraordinary effect in a world that seems decidedly far away and lost between nothing and nothingness..."
"......‘intriguing and often haunting..."
Andy Hamilton Jazz Review
All About Jazz
"The emphasis is still clearly free improvisation, but there has always been a songlike pulse in almost every Hume/May performance"
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Brian Morton Jazz journal
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Shape of the Night
by Phil Johnson
UK Jazz News
Starting with their critically-acclaimed debut, ‘Zero, released in the year 2000, the duo of pianist Carolyn Hume and drummer Paul May has produced seven albums on Leo Records, mixing unusually sensitive, rhapsodic even, free improv with intensely percussive, often drum and bassy, rhythms. It’s a very singular sound and no-one else has really followed it, although for a while the jazziness of jungle was a much vaunted trend, with Pat Metheny getting it on with Goldie and Spring Heel Jack providing the missing link between Everything But the Girl and Evan Parker, both of whom they worked with. There’s also a kind of science fiction, J.G. Ballard, vibe to Hume and May’s very distinctive oeuvre, reflected in some of the album titles: ‘By Lakes Abandoned’, ‘Flames Undressed By Water’, ‘Wet Map’.‘Shape of the Night’ continues their resolute style, in which an almost pointillist landscape of ethereally indefinite, very spare-sounding piano figures is given the counterweight of a bit of heavy welly from May’s kit-drums. The precise acuity of their attitude to sound really is something to hear, as every single brassy ring of a cymbal’s graded circumference seems to communicate clearly, while Hume’s minimalist approach to melody means that mere fragments or half-formed repetitions take on an almost mythic significance, such is the ocean of near-silence surrounding them.The first two tracks of ’Shape of the Night’ exemplify the hard-won virtues of these chosen methods. The opener, ‘Fatal’, with Hume playing acoustic piano, seconded by a subtle synth-wash background, is so slow in tempo that the nine-minute long piece might qualify as durational, while May on the kit plus what the sleeve lists as “intimate metals” gives it the full shake, rattle and roll. By contrast, the second track, ‘Bill and Marty’, begins with May’s repeated brushes-on-snare jungle rhythms, setting up a trance-like atmospheric background that becomes the very effective setting for Hume’s oblique, chordal contributions on a Rhodesy electric keyboard. On the closing title track, they are joined by Duke Garwood on vocals, and the guitarist Berndt Rest plays on ‘Poison Melody’. It’s odd and very addictive.Label: Leo Records
Jazz Views
Ken Cheetham 'Kill the Lights'
Hume and May have recorded and performed together for some twenty years now, this being their sixth album together on Leo Records. This is very much an album of ‘Ambient’ music, so named by Brian Eno, author of Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Polydor Records, 1978). Eno did not invent the genre, but that album was the first to be fabricated expressly within the ambient music convention.
So is this music atmospheric, cinematographic, minimalist, intended and designed to reduce anxiety and tension, and truly “as ignorable as it is interesting” that would “induce calm and a space to think.” These words are Brian Eno’s, borrowed from his sleeve notes for Music for Airports.
There is more. Kill the Lights also encompasses jazz and free improv used to create swathes of sonic landforms of exotic heights and mysterious depths. These soundscapes exhibit subtle modifications of disposition and consistency that render them unassuming but particularly efficacious. The piano playing is at times entrancing, chords muffled as though in the vast and empty confines of a cathedral, yet retaining delicacy and vagueness.
Paul May is highly thought of in the free improv community, playing in a broad range of groups all with different notions to the idea of ‘free’. He has been active in the formation of numerous groups and collaborators and his six albums with Hume have been well received.
Hume and May together show that they too can follow the generally accepted tenet in the land of the Free – they listen and can hear. Throughout Kill the Lights the music remains cohesive, retaining an unswerving sound and disposition.
