Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On is a collaboration between Scottish composers Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman. Wasylyk’s previous work has combined kosmische, jazz, and classical, while Perman’s background resides within the broad church of electronica. The 10 tracks on the album were constructed with Perman providing written cues – via “tempo” and “chord” cards – and processing Wasylyk’s resulting improvisations. The concept drawn from Fluxus, and also, perhaps owing something to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

(Photograph by Fraser Simpson)

The opening, muted, fluttering, Climb Like A Floating Vapour begins almost like dub techno, before sax and piano turn it into something akin to a modern Soft Machine. Communal Imagination gently gyrates in a dance floor direction. The saxophone honking, skronking, out a house-y riff, blessed with a blues-y, gospel ring. Root Grow Emerge is softer, more subdued. Where the rasping reed and plaintive piano accompany the voices of Perman’s children as they recite, mantra-like, the title. Together synergising to shape a slowly evolving spiritual. This meditative mood continues on The Unbearable Sound Of The Roses which collages temple tingsha, birdsong, and cascades of elegantly echoed keys.

Speck Of Dust Becomes A Beam introduces a head nodding beat. Military snares marching in from its distance. Eventually erupting with epic orchestral strings. In the aftermath of this emotive explosion Unrepeatable Air employs only piano and synth to sympathetically shadow a speech concerned with finding god in acts of creation and artistically expressing ourselves. Remain In Memory Full Of Light is a very cool contrabass groove. Coalescing around more mantras – “hand to hand, heart to heart” – it orbits a space between US post-rockers Tortoise / Isotope 217 and Sun Ra’s Twin Stars Of Thence.

Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On itself is a sleepy, romantic serenade, dancing delicately on brushed drums. In contrast the closing Be The Hammer is a defiant anthem. Half sung / half spoken by Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat – in his instantly recognisable rich streetwise Falkirk brogue – its poetry swaps the larks and long lost weekends of his youth for fuel to the fire, punch to the fight, of a united pissed off disenfranchised.

Andrew Wasylyk and Tommy Perman’s Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On is out very soon on Clay Pipe Music.

(Photograph by Fraser Simpson)