So here’s a slight mood change from yesterday’s sweeping strings and acoustic melancholy.

Slow Focus, the album The Red Wing appears on, is one of the more terrifyingly oppressive pieces of music I’ve listened to this year. Hearing it for the first time, for a while it feels like being slowly and remorselessly crushed by something that’s taken a disliking to you. It’s the sheer physicality of the music that pushes down on you. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Once you get past that not entirely pleasant sensation, you start to appreciate it’s full palette. Listening to The Red Wing what strikes you is how it just keeps opening up more and more, and you start to wonder how it can be possible that this thing just seems to be getting louder and louder. And then at the point when it pretty much can’t conceivably get any louder, from somewhere a new barrage comes hurtling in and does just that.

And just when you’ve finally got the hang of it, the layers are stripped away, leaving only the relentless pounding that seemed so harsh when you started, but which now seems strangely becalmed.

PS - Listen to the version on Spotify for the full effect - the soundcloud and youtube versions are both heavily edited, so you don’t get the nearly as much of the pleasure/pain.