I am a bead on the thread connecting my father and daughter

My friend Michael sent me some rough mixes of his second album with Bendle (Crow) last summer, and I’ve been meaning to write about them ever since. The album, which is now finished and mixed and available via Michael’s blog, is called While Speaking Softly You can Hear the Insects Sing. It’s really beautiful, like the first one, with a sort of dreamy layer of murmured spoken word (that’s Bendle, I think) over a mesh of incandescent guitar and drums (Michael, I assume). Last time, I said it reminded me of Current 93, and I think that’s still a fair reference point, though I am also hearing bits that remind me of the Incredible String Band this time around, and other auras that sound like Belong and William Basinski, and as someone else mentioned last time, later, more experimental John Fahey. My favorite piece is something called “Zebra Mix 12feb,” which starts in a sort of monk’s chant and weaves through a hallucinatory landscape of echoey, interleaved vocals, eastern tinged guitar and hand drums. I am also quite taken with “Breathing In Mix 19 June”, which has a circling, almost round-like quality, three voices this time, one a woman, in overlapping layers, whose delicacy is not at all undermined by some very distorted guitar and battering drums. But anyway, why take my word for it, when you can have the whole thing?