Super review by Cal Gibson, of The Secret Soul Society.

With another summer mooching slovenly away from off the hissing lawns, thoughts turn to books and bedtimes, to finding some sort of order in the universe (perhaps). As such, Benjamin Labatut’s wonderful fictional delve into the theories of physics When We Cease To Understand The World has been omnipresent, and as the mind twists and turns deep into the pages and the crevasses of his vision, The Tinnitus Chorus has been the soundtrack to the imagination leaping up and letting go.

Twelve gentle forays into the cosmos, twelve essays in sustained listening: drones and melodies pallid and illuminating: the geometry of the universe set down for those tuning in. Mojave Flowers opens proceedings, a sweeping devotional of deft sustained guitar strings emerging slowly as a lighthouse for the soul. Field recordings and barefoot blues, unkempt beards and a longing for distant lives.

Make Time features veteran Spanish musician / composer Suso Saiz and employs softened shards of sound to construct a carbonised ruin of the past, all twisted roots and melancholic rain: the warm stench of life ending, life beginning, life continuing. A vastness nestled in amongst the everyday – Blake’s heaven in a grain of sand.

Mono Lake ticks uncontrollably, a strangeness upon the waters, a soft glow over the horizon. You may find yourself alone again in the city, always alone, always wondering if this is all there is, if this is all there will ever be. The sun rises, a new faded beauty takes over – radiant and unashamed.

Fondness is a groggy romp, Vembi Dekula‘s Congolese guitar patterns twinkling, eternal, hissing and kissing in the dark. Synth pads evolving gently behind the picking, a complex vision of the simple facts of life.

Nothing is hurried, time itself hangs suspended in thrall to the pleasure of harmonic expression. What price tinnitus when the music of the stars is such a joyful enigma. This is an album of blurred lives, of life seen through the window of a moving train, of something always happening somewhere, but somewhere far away and unvisitable. The child grows, the trees shake the rain from their leaves.

All this shall pass. Life remains largely incomprehensible, yes, but life remains. These are songs of innocence and experience (to lean into Blake again), of sensitivity and endless abstraction. A whispered delight.

Michael Scott Dawson’s The Tinnitus Chorus is out now on We Are Busy Bodies.