Peter Wright - At Last a New Dawn (Students of Decay, 2007)

1-1 Urban Wolves (10:50)
1-2 Death Ships Approaching (9:24)
1-3 Glass Floor Vertigo (3:58)
1-4 The Big Fight (18:00)
1-5 The Whole Facade Will Come Crumbling Down (7:06)
2-1 Blue Light District (9:53)
2-2 Punishment Drugs (7:15)
2-3 At Last A New Dawn (34:06)
2-4 When It Was Calmer The Bleeding Stopped (3:46)

Sans doute le chef d'oeuvre de Peter Wright, drones de guitares fantomatiques et field recordings parfaitement à propos. Mort, douleur, perte mais aussi espoir et rédemption....

Since Peter Wright dropped his last record the field in which he operates, guitar-based drones augmented by field recordings, has become increasingly crowded. Few other contenders, though, are making records with this much class and emotional enormity.

Talking about specific tracks on an album like this seems a little redundant (most of the titles seem like afterthoughts anyway, hardly fitting descriptions of Wright's glistening and churning universes of sound).

The album opens quietly before escalating into seething undulation that treads nimbly along the chaos/beauty divide. This gives way to distant whistling and hollering. Midway through disc one there a merciful lull in the emotional overload as chiming fingerpicking rings out into space.
Disc two opens with a track containing samples of news reports of the London underground bombings, the track was composed by Wright on the morning of the bombings as police sirens made their way through the city. Where so much drone-based music seeks to evoke galaxies and clouds and strives for transcendence rather than be concerned with anything as earthbound as terrorism, Wright has created a beautiful and distinctly human moment of sadness.

What Wright injects into his music to separate it from the drone horde is difficult to define, but it seems to me that this record is permeated by the same kind of longing and indefinable sadness that defines the best work of artists like Richard Youngs and Alastair Galbraith. One of the year's monumental works.
Foxy Digitalis

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