Almost An Island - Almost An Island (PITP)

The Slow Music Movement
Aug 12
2 min read

*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's August 10th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***

This is the cover art for Almost An Island's self titled album. It shows a surreal collage of a cut out female torso, covered in a map, with entwined hands against a blurred mountain backdrop. Earthy tones create a dreamlike atmosphere.

Kenneth James Gibson has been flitting between hazy ambient, low gravity folk and crunchy machine music, although tending towards the lysergic drumless soundscape end of the musical spectrum, for a while, so a collaboration with established ambient sages and life partners Cynthia (Substack’s marine eyes) and James Bernard was always going to be filled with promise, and I’m glad to report they’ve delivered.

The trio start by ditching that troublesome gravity and set about orbitting the earth in gaseous electronic form, the shape barely held together by the gentle momentum. It’s a return to earth on “An Ode to Nothing” as acoustic guitar, distant slide, ambient swathes and pulsing low frequencies contemplate everything and nothing at the same time - thought cleansing those withing earshot for the electroacoustic “Wide Open”, which gradually rises like the sun over the hills, propped up by some brushed rather than bruised percussion, as contemplative guitar and Mrs. Bernard’s voice ascend higher for a better view of the slowly warming, now visible soundscape.

The album’s electroacoustic credentials are firmed up on “Perfume Gloves”, the track’s minimal electronic refrains urging their guitar counterpart to ever dreamier heights. Next up is the somewhat sentimental “What Got Us To Our Feet”, where bowed and twanged strings and those celestial vocals again, weave a sad song to soundtrack your moments of melancholy. “Lonesome Sound” drifts over the primordial soup looking for life and company, perhaps even witnessing “In Light Of” rise from the waters aided by its percussive legs which struggle under the electronic weight, as the first song like vocal harmonies are born into the previously lifeless landscape. Good natured ambient Americana is the order of the day on “Palo Verde”, before the album says its farewell via the mildly dramatic, pleasantly cinematic, ambient classical strains of “Promise To Fade”

The album is a collaborative triumph that blurs the lines between song and soundscape, and might even be that rare thing, an ambient project that looks, as well as sounds good on a stage. Hats off to the trio and fingers crossed for more to come.