Mark Hollis

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.