Review – Avebury Soundscapes

1 min read
Steve Marshall
www.exploringavebury.com, £11
Sound Pod PODCD001
Review Rob Ixer

This is an aural companion piece to Marshall’s lyrical photographic vision of the Neolithic landscape of ‘Greater Avebury’, as seen in his Exploring Avebury: The Essential Guide (see CA 322), Like that book, this is the work of an assured artist.

The ten tracks take natural sounds – the bubbling of springs (a theme flowing throughout the book), birds flying overhead, and the sound of a skylark ascending – and beds them within soaring chords and sustained rhythms. Nothing is intrusive, all is in harmony and balance (well, some of the more disco-style tracks are clearly rhythmical). For Marshall, this music (selfwritten, played, and produced) evokes and epitomises his 21st-century synthesised (but not synthetic) response to mystical Avebury. But for listeners, there may be other subliminal memories or echoes – Radiophonic Dr Who, Vangelis’ Blade Runner, Holst’s Saturn, and even some gamelan – returning them to other lost dreamtimes; perhaps most notably, the mellow days of the late 1960s and ’70s.

Will this sarsen-techno overtake steampunk in popularity? Perhaps not, but ‘I have heard things you people wouldn’t believe’.

This review appeared in CA 336

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