Mark Hollis

Released

Seven years after the release of Laughing Stock, the final album by the late Mark Hollis’s group Talk Talk, he returned with an album that took the wide-open spaces of its predecessor to new terrain. In the intervening years, he’d discovered the music of Morton Feldman, which seems somehow core to what happens on Mark Hollis: there’s a notched intensity to the music that reflects Feldman’s compositions, and a similar deference to silence. It’s not minimal(ist); it is mostly, quietly played; the songs are bleached, bare, patient. There’s not much else like it in modern music, though its gravity, and its clarity of vision, suggests parallels with Scott Walker, intent-wise if not sound-wise. It’s no surprise that Hollis didn’t make another album after this; it has the import of a definitive full stop.

Jon Dale

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