Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner.

I came to Caolifhionn Rose’s Constellation with a little background knowledge. Born and bred in Manchester, Caolifhionn worked with Vini Reilly / The Durutti Column back in 2011, on the album, Chronicle XL, so I was familiar with her name. Chronicle XL came out of one of Vini’s last live shows, a show that was difficult for Vini in all sorts of ways. He was unwell, having suffered two strokes, and had painfully pieced his guitar playing back together. He’d also split with his girlfriend Poppy, who then agreed to sing on some of the songs, turning the show and the subsequent album into a very painful break up project. It was long standing Durutti Column drummer and friend Bruce Mitchell who encouraged Vini to document the physical and emotional turmoil of the show as Chronicle XL. Caolifhionn sings on four of the songs on the album, and two of these, Free From All The Chaos and Number Three, were released as a 7” single in summer 2020, on Vini’s birthday. A gorgeous Durutti Column release, one of the last with new material, it was wrapped in a Trevor Johnson sleeve. The sleeve is an Ordnance Survey map of south Manchester, with several streets I’ve lived on visible, something that’s always endeared the release to me. Not that any Durutti Column release needs any further reasons for me to love it beyond Vini’s guitar playing and music.

More recently I was in Piccadilly Records and Caolifhionn’s Constellation was displayed in the rack at the front of the store, one of the staff’s picks of the week – something that’s always worth paying attention to. Constellation was next to Fat White Family’s Forgiveness Is Yours, an album that comes from a very different place and takes the listener somewhere very different too (and also a record worth paying attention to but that’s another story).

Constellation is an album that was born as a celebration of the wonder of nature, one that builds on a wide range of influences from ambient to classical and folk to jazz, an album that tries to piece together a way forward in a post-Covid world. The song titles reflect this – Constellation, Drifting Dust, Rainfall, Into Sky – and also the sense of calm and consciousness she’s trying to achieve – Wandering Mind, Momentary, Simple.

The title track starts the album, fading in quickly, an ambient backdrop of synths and strings, with Caolifhionn’s clear voice to the fore, weightless and bright. On Momentary the piano and synths echo Roger Eno’s playing, while live drums and bursts of sax bring an ambient jazz feel. Rainfall brings more ambience, with found sounds and samples, a cymbal being tapped, and tinkling piano. After a minute, this wash pulls together into something more structured, and a song forms as if out of a summer shower – it’s magical, a song that sounds like it’s full of wonder. On Simple that rattle of the drum kit takes the lead, the piano playing behind it as Caolifhionn’s voice takes off, the experimental and ambient production adding texture and feel. Across the whole album the production is stunning, making the songs sound like they did indeed form out of a ball of cosmic gas or drop out of the heavens. The piano wanders in and takes the lead on Fall Into Place and then a cinematic backdrop pulls in behind it with strings and synths, the sound opening right up. Drifting Dust is a joy, the song and the title reflecting each other perfectly – piano and wordless vocals with a jazz rhythm. The final song, A Light In The Middle, floats in, more cosmic/ ambience and jazz drumming, airy and unearthly, and that voice again in the centre, FXed so it sounds like it’s moving slowly away – which eventually it does as the song finishes with a waft of sax, acres of echo and flutter and the sense of something endless.

Caolifhionn Rose’s Constellation is out now on Gondwana Records.

You can find more proper, on point, prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area. Adam is also part of the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate.