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LP
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ODA 008LP
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Church Andrews and Matt Davies return with Tilt, a pinpoint collection of skewed microtonal and discordant compositions for percussion and digital synth. Tones ascend but don't resolve, rhythms loop, collapse and reassemble, patterns wriggle with geometric precision, sounds tilt, the edges fray. Kinetic, elastic, wonky without being obtuse, Church Andrews (aka Kirk Barley) and Matt Davies new LP Tilt is the culmination of six years of creative collaboration, refining and redrawing the relationship between Davies' virtuoso percussive practice and Barley's off-kilter synthesis. Where their 2024 release, Yucca, took rhythmic cues from the Fibonacci sequence, Tilt explores a more intuitive approach, returning the duo to a minimal sound interrogating the interplay of chance and control, system and body, freedom and mechanization. Featuring prepared guitar, finely resonant muted percussion and a crisp palette of digital synths, it draws on the pair's long-standing interest in alternate time signatures. Here, a tripped-up 11/8 beat gives "Yokai" a disorientating quality, threading unusual paths through the playful, mysterious 5-note Hirajoshi scale -- a pentatonic scale from Japan hinted at in the track's playful reference to a supernatural spirit in the country's folklore. Using a simple on-off system between drum and synth to trigger a Shepard tone -- an auditory illusion of a sound that ascends or descends in pitch without actually changing -- "Shepherd" revels in the stripped-back simplicity of its sonic palette, where the nuance lies in what Barley calls "subtleties in the timbre of the sounds" as they dialogue with Davies' warped loops. It's these finely tuned melodic drum tones and an eerily abstracted prepared guitar that give "Debris" its uncanny feel, yet never feeling overly controlled. Like the album's meticulous, graphic artwork, Tilt seeks the shifting ground between the physical and the digital, as acoustic tones are tweaked and disambiguated into new and unexpected forms. Tilt represents Church Andrews and Matt Davies' ongoing collaboration in its purest form -- a hyper-defined evocation of gravitational potential in their live sound.
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LP
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ODA 003LP
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Church Andrews and Matt Davies weave intricate patterns from Fibonacci sequences on new mini-album, Yucca. Producer and composer Church Andrews (aka Kirk Barley) and drummer Matt Davies return to explore the outer limits of rhythm on a six-track suite that is at once angular and fluid, natural and systematic. Drawn to the restrictions of working solely with one synth and live drums, the pair found creativity in limitation, developing a compositional dialogue between the sonic timbres of Kirk's productions and Matt's percussive practice. Evoking the primitive yet complex form of the plant from which it takes its name, Yucca features tracks that are built around rhythmic ratios of the Fibonacci sequence. Mirroring spiral patterns exhibited in nature, each track evolves like a cellular structure of its own, from the livewire syntax of "Chirp" and the deconstructed ebb and flow of "Ferns," to the mini-album's title track, where crisp grooves flit between modulated electronics like fireflies. "I've always been inspired by music that is complex without sounding complex," Matt explains. He maintains a sense of bounce amid the intricate phrasing and cites drummers Roy Haynes and his grandson Marcus Gilmore as inspirations, alongside sabar drummers from Senegal and Mridangam drumming of South India. With a shared background in hip-hop and the swung beats of J Dilla and Flying Lotus, Kirk Barley and Matt Davies were also inspired by the minimalism of Terry Riley and the sparse palette of dub techno. Written and recorded in Lewisham in the spring and summer of 2023, Yucca follows the release of Axis in 2022, with the duo having also performed at festivals such as Rewire and Waking Life, and recorded live sessions for FACT magazine and Worldwide FM. The third release on Yorkshire-based Odda Recordings, following Kirk Barley's Marionette and Flaer's Preludes, Yucca confirms the label's reputation for championing music on the unstable ground between the organic and the synthetic.
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