Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner.

John Haycock is a Manchester based multi-instrumentalist who trained for a decade with Gambian griot and kora master Jali Nyonkoling Kuyateh. John’s music fuses West African instruments, especially the aforementioned 21-stringed harp, with electronics and woodwinds, creating pieces that are part ambient, part classical minimalism, part spiritual jazz, and part Jon Hassell’s Fourth World. There’s some dub in there too.

John’s new E.P., Resonance, contains only two tracks – the three minute Nyama and the nineteen minute titular number.  The former is a meditative, gradually unfolding creation, with FX and other strings flitting in and out of the kora. It’s a lush, melodious composition with a sense of space and flight, that sounds improvised but I imagine was meticulously worked out.

The latter starts with an clarinet descending, then adds woodwinds, and the kora’s strings. Stirring a soup of minimal and organic sounds, with foreground melodies and a wash of backdrop ambience, that’s both absorbing and entrancing. Some ambient music fades as it plays, and sometimes that’s the point, to be faintly present, a soft sonic background to your world. Resonance though is much more in the room, much more musical. At around twelve minutes a drone moves to the fore, a swirl of FX with the John’s intricate plucking adrift within it, until his playing rises and swells to become the main event again. The final five minutes see the electronics and wooden and stringed instruments combine in a blur, a ball of spiritual sound that becomes the dead centre and focus of your existence, before, eventually, submitting to silence. 

John Haycock’s Resonance can be ordered directly from Bandcamp. 

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.