Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner.

Kevin McCormick is one of late 70s/ early 80s Manchester’s lost musicians. A man whose work has since been rediscovered via not one but two wonderful reissues on Smiling C.

Inspired by musicians such as Alice Coltrane, Erik Satie, John Martyn, Terry Riley and David Crosby, Kevin and friend David Horridge found themselves in the famous Strawberry Studios on Waterloo Road, Stockport, bringing their ambient, meditative, slow burning guitar instrumentals to life in the same space that Joy Division, A Certain Ratio and Durutti Column – among others – recorded. There’s some musical kinship with Vini Reilly and The Durutti Column – the use of the guitar as an ambient instrument – in Kevin and David’s music although in places their sound is quite different to Vini’s.

Passing Clouds is Kevin’s brand new album. The product of several guitars, some FX pedals, a violin bow, a Portastudio it perfectly captures the ambient sound of Manchester. The album arrives gently with Star Watching: layers of guitars, finger picking acoustic parts and bassy twangs of the thickest top strings circling around each other, an electric interjection here and there, the deep thrum of the violin bow and some high frequency feedback coming and going. It has a dusty blues feel in places, like Paris, Texas relocated to northwest England, and is hazy, sparse and solitary. The sound of long afternoons with nothing particular to do and hours in which to do it.

Over the course of the nine tracks the palette doesn’t vary too much – echo and delay are ever present as are two or three guitars delicately woven around each other. It’s Been A Long Time is a beauty, a track that sounds like four guitarists playing together rather than just one, each instrument doing something different, sparking off each other. Pebbles is fragile and gossamer, a gauze of FX ambience and calming drones.

On the title track Kevin’s guitar is distant, some muted notes combining with longer, slow strums. The song’s titles are mostly references to actions and locations and highly evocative – Passing Clouds, Beach Walk, Bell Tower. Manchester’s music isn’t just the huge stadium-sized choruses of champagne supernovas and men who think they’re resurrections – it’s the sounds of Passing Clouds and a hundred other records too that were released in the period that followed punk and got lost. On Not Think the hazed sheen of the background guitar and the delay FX on the lead work their magic, summoning Manchester’s weather and environment – not just the rain but those occasional days of summer heat, the greens of Fog Lane and Alexandra Park, the greys of Market Street on a Saturday afternoon, the yellow of the Arndale, waiting for a train at Oxford Road, or the bus at Piccadilly Gardens, The Crescents in Hulme, the smell of tarmac and takeaways, evenings chasing the last of the sun in pub backyards and beer gardens.

Kevin McCormick’s Passing Clouds is forthcoming on Second Thoughts.

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.