POST MOVES AND THE SOUND MEMORY ENSEMBLE - Recall The Dream Breath LP

Under the moniker Post Moves, composer and interdisciplinary artist Sam Wenc has released a series of records, utilising pedal steel, guitar, vibraphone, electronics, percussion and field recordings to create music that sits at the intersection of folk, jazz and spiritual minimalism—a kind of avant-Americana. Previous album Heart Music, a 2LP built on percussion that was described “celebrates the process of making something new. Rhythm as a line to guide the listener in, movement as an agent of change."

Recall.. is stripped back, decluttered, both in terms of the instruments used (pedal steel returns as main player, along with bass and banjo) and the underlying atmosphere. Intuition and experimentation are still important, but here they are unshackled from the contextual intricacies of the previous record. The result is something freer, a widescreen meandering journey through dreams and memories as a means to better situate the listener in their present.

This is apparent from opener ‘Grief Fields’. Sparse lines of pedal steel are left to wander against a softly quiet backdrop like streaks of dawn cloud. But from the halfway point it begins to gather momentum, the slow beat of percussion heralding the arrival of additional instrumentation that rises in a dramatic crest. This eventually subsides, leaving behind a solitary banjo and a hushed sense of post-storm calm, and with the sense of having been through something and emerged on the other side.

Closer ‘The Suicide Tree’ is perhaps the most cinematic piece, the slow swell of ambient textures and bright specks of strings layered over field recordings of everyday life—children’s voices and the nameless ambience of not-silence that surrounds us always. The final third changes tack, switching to audio from an educational film about trees as the rich atmosphere dims to nothing, replaced with needling drones that buzz and whir like honeybees before clanking and sputtering to a discordant, almost disconcerting, finish.