A limited edition run of six (!) releases from Andrew Chalk featuring four separate 'The Circle Of Days' releases cycle, 'One Long Year' and 'Paradise Lost'. Each is limited to between 60 and 100 copies only so don't hang about...For the past two decades, Andrew Chalk has carefully honed an elegant and eloquent take on the drone. He started releasing noise cassettes in the mid-1980s as Ferial Confine but, soon after, Chalk redirected his thinking and started exploring field recordings, delicate manipulations of timbre and the unlocked power of bowed instruments. Through concurrent work with Jonathan Coleclough, Giancarlo Toniutti, Brendan Walls, Christoph Heemann (in the recently disbanded Mirror) and Colin Potter and Darren Tate (in Ora), Chalk has proved himself an unusually sensitive collaborator, his individual thumbprint distinguishable yet carefully enmeshed with that of his associates. Since the, Chalk has obsessively reiterated the same concerns, searching out music that transcends the workaday manifestations of ‘drone’ in order to access something beyond its surface simplicity.

The music on these tapes is either beautiful and enigmatic. Over the six releases, Chalk blurs and bends single notes and spare clusters from a piano, wavering between lyrical statements and overtone-rich abstraction. He slows and spaces the rich organ-type tones so that the piece constantly refreshes itself, folding its endings into its beginnings and vice versa. The dynamics might be the opposite of traditional noise and drone pieces, but the effect is strangely similar – albeit heightened and more nuanced. The mind empties, your biorhythms adapt to Chalk’s excruciatingly slow pace, and you become aware only of where individual sounds begin and end.

This is sculptural, present music, for which background details ultimately seem superfluous, and which makes the past as well as the future feel entirely open