Adam Stafford – Reverse Drift

Certain musicians – your Brian Enos, your Mogwais – are like alchemists, turning sound into vision. They make abstract, texturally rich instrumental music that through some mysterious means projects vivid pictures onto our imaginations as we listen. We see landscapes, scenery, sunlight.

For Reverse Drift, Adam Stafford inverted that process. The Falkirk based composer, award winning filmmaker and helmsman of defunct local heroes Y’All is Fantasy Island gathered some existing photographs and performed a soundtrack to accompany them, all of it recorded in a single forty minute take. The images are stark and eerie, depicting roads and trees shot through windows, patches of light on walls and other lonely tableaus. Together with music, they offer an immersive, slightly unsettling three-act journey into desolate twilight world where time seems to stand still.

Stafford approaches musical ideas like a meditator treats thoughts, allowing them to linger only briefly before setting them free and welcoming in the next. Early on, a drunken starfield of chimes dissolves into chanting that mimics factory machinery. Later, a mechanical bird’s quack gives way to clarinets that scurry around like extras in an old soviet film. Stafford's use of loops and delay mean you can always hear a ghostly after-image of what’s come before, yet what lies ahead is a surprise right to the last. It makes for a demanding listen, but a rich and evocative one that rewards your attention.

Listen to: "in one uninterrupted sitting, preferably with headphones or played incredibly loud"