The Cable House

There’s something obsessively reiterative about the material on The Cable House, another in the stream of self-released albums Andrew Chalk produced in the late noughties. It returns to earlier forms – the driftwood melancholy of Time Of Hayfield, the pointillist impressions of Goldfall – and pares them back to something resembling rudiment; what’s here is the skeleton of song, with fog and wind rustling through bones, carving architectures of air within the music’s rib cage. The tinkling piano melodies here are pendulous, like weighted branches fighting against the elements, shyly dipping into rivulets of texture that run through crevices in the rockface.