It’s an evocative name don’t you think? Ex-Easter Island Head. It stands tall, casting deep, dark, shadows across the blank formalism the ensemble has used for their music’s titles in the past. I mention this because new album Norther is named for the north wind and its six tracks also have titles suggestive of something beyond the unique instrumentation that created it. From perfunctory enumeration they have shuffled on over to the ever present (and very English) subject of the weather.
Coughing politely, ambient opener ‘Weather’ sketches out this loose concept in long shimmery lines. Notes spatter across strings like silver drops of rain, the bass soughs in the distance. In the mind’s eye clouds roll across the top of the valley, their shadows contorting across its floor. Some effort has been made to reflect matters meteorological but, perhaps unsurprisingly, this has a solid musical foundation, an aeolian harp joins their instrumentation here, its tones informing the compositions, notably the joyous banger of the title track.
‘Norther’ is an undeniable peak, a current of lustrous, dynamic, sound rushing towards you and lifting you along with it. There’s no drag from heavy intellectual processing, just step into the stream. With Ex-Easter Island Head there’s a contrast or tension between their inputs and methods and the experience of the music itself. The framing can seem academic – prepared guitar, extended technique, minimalist repetition – but the results are rarely dry and systematic. Their charm has always been in holding these elements in balance but ‘Norther’ transcends into something more immediate.
An extra pair of hands since the last album (2016’s Twenty-Two Strings) Andrew Hunt is a long time collaborator who also produced the album. Where earlier records captured the remarkable interplay of their performances, having a band member recording and mixing allows for richer textures. Each of these pieces have their own discreet sound worlds. ‘Easter’ is chiming and percussive, rhythmically busy like ‘Norther’ but different in mood and tone. On the calmer ‘Magnetic Language’ vocal loops chirrup and burble among soft strings. Prettier still ‘Golden Bridges’ is almost twinkling, a bright pattern that circles and descends into a cave of drones and tones that carry over into ‘Lodestone’. A series of string hits that hang in the air, reverberating, slowly becoming more complex as it drifts softly away.
This then, is Ex-Easter Island Head’s most welcoming album yet but they bring up the weather not to make convivial small talk, more to wonder at its eternal elemental mystery. There’s a clip here of them performing in a museum so you can admire their prepared guitars and fastidious process. The museum even stands behind their name, for where else did all those itinerant Moai statues wind up, stoically enduring the whine of modernity? Academic concerns may be their native soil, to an extent Ex-Easter Island Head make music about making music, but crucially they launch from that into something that approaches pure sound, largely unadorned and disentangled from the exhausting clatter of the world. Science and magic.
