1 The Snow Queen (5:39)
2 Empty Rooms (4:44)
3 The Softest Blue (4:01)
4 Nightingales (6:13)
5 Never A Wave (3:03)
6 Two Clear Eyes (3:58)
7 Dreams (4:28)
8 A Summer Interlude (3:31)
9 Sleep In The Woods / Reprise (5:31)
Seconde réalisation de Vikki Jackman, celle ci consiste en 9 pièces, nettement plus courtes que sur son précédent album, dont émanent calme, beauté, nostalgie et fragilité. Le piano dont les notes sont rares est mêlé à des traitements électroniques ou à des field recordings, ainsi qu'à divers autres instruments... Vikki Jackman arrive à imposer son propre style, un peu à l'écart des productions de drones auxquelles nous a habitués Faraway Press.
Chalk, Mirror, and Heemann fans are loyal because they're assured of the quality of the releases and in that respect, this is no exception. Like the Faraway Press catalogue, Whispering Pages is calm, reflective, and the packaging is top quality both aesthetically and practically. Unlike the other releases, it consists of nine distinct songs and Jackman's main instrument is the piano, but the variety of pieces makes for an exceptionally well-rounded album.
She opens surprisingly with a song filled with subtle electric pulses and hums underscoring her atmospheric and echoed playing. Tonality is key on "The Snow Queen" as certain notes are chosen to resonate more than others, creating a gorgeous all-encompassing sound bath. "Empty Rooms" sounds exactly like that: Vikki playing solo in a room on a still summer evening accompanied only by the sound of her shifting on the piano bench and what could possibly be some wind chimes hanging in a doorway off to the side, the hiss of the slow moving air adding to the atmospherics. "The Softest Blue," my favorite piece (and one which I featured on last week's Podcast) is a drastic contrast: multilayered with low-end synthetic string swells that any Stars of the Lid fan would immediately latch on to, yet it's accented with backwards echoes and a plucking of high strings on top that sets it far apart enough from the duo. Swelling backwards-like echoes make the tones on "Nightingales" reminiscent of Nurse With Wound's "Funeral Music for Perez Prado," closing what would be side 1 of this disc, had it been a record.
Jackman once again reintroduces electronic pulses and inhuman frequencies on the opener of the second half, "Never a Wave," and maintains the feel through the Chain Reaction school of dub influence on "Two Clear Eyes," as now there are low end bass lines underneath the Hammond organ-esque echoes. The music returns to the serene with "Dreams" and "A Summer Interlude," both with Vikki's piano front and center bathed in the sounds of the outdoors: birds, wind, an occasional train passing by. Whispering Pages concludes with a two distinct (and not cross-faded) pieces sharing a singular track index: "Sleep in the Woods" reprises the sound of "Nightingales" while "Reprise" is reminiscent of "Empty Rooms." I don't consider this a mis-step but I think more attention could have been played to actually closing the song (and thus the album) with a finite cadence.
With Whispering Pages, Vikki Jackman has established her own identity apart from Faraway Press and Andrew Chalk and has done it with an exceptionally good album. While more famous publications will probably not catch on to her for a few more years, I would hope that offerings from other recording companies might boost her profile. Although she may not be seeking that, I personally think more music listeners deserve to hear something this great.
Brainwashed
buy
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As we mentioned previously... Of Beauty Reminiscing is the debut album for Vikki Jackman who had previously contributed the evocative if very minimal clusters of piano notes on Andrew Chalk's Goldfall LP from a few months back. So taken was he by the results of that source material, Chalk offered Ms. Jackman an album of her own, which he would produce and release through his Faraway Press imprint. The piano that Jackman uses could never be confused for a concert piano as the antiquated instrument offers forth slightly askew if thoroughly elegant notes; and Jackman certainly emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of that piano through her fragile, open-ended and sparsely laid out melodies, which hold some similarities to Erik Satie's or maybe even Morton Feldman's piano compositions smeared with a decaying Victorian gracefulness. One half of this disc features Jackman by her lonesome, and the other appears to exhibit the hand of Andrew Chalk blurring the edges of many of her tones into a wistful fog of drifting dronescaping. Beautifully packaged and highly recommended. 
