If you’ve heard last year’s Music And Migration II compilation – all 500 copies of which have now sold out – you will have marked the subtle presence of Padang Food Tigers and the ghost breath of their contribution, Honey Stole The Crown. Stephen Lewis and RC’s own Spencer Grady generate weightless acoustic instrumental music which seems to mostly consist of fresh air, mysterious river water and windblown dandelion seeds gathering in dewy webs.
Granted, it sells them way short to merely apply a rustic, bucolic and pastoral tick list: similarly, it would be too much of a cliché to describe Ready Country Nimbus as headily evocative music for a film that doesn’t yet exist, particularly when the mind’s eye in itself is compelled to conjure such complete and keenly emotive imagery.
In short, it’s unreasonably lovely. Its halting, suspended spaces encourage an agreeable introspection: In My Heart I’m Already Gone and For Esmé are the closest it gets to conventionally arranged thematic compositions, but it’s not as though you’ll be craving form and function elsewhere. Listen out for the barely-there It’s A Fucker – probably not what you were expecting – the unsettling children’s laughter in Little Smiler, and Juliette, a Spectorian cave of twinkling reverb.
