Saltillo - Ganglion
Menton J. Matthews distills the emotional weight of loss and heartbreak down to the tremor of a violin's string and the vibration of a cello's wooden frame. Stepping out from Sunday Munch to record Ganglion as Saltillo, Matthews offers twelve tracks that merge chamber orchestra intimacy with the caliginous seduction of trip-hop.
Matthews has scored a few soundtracks in his time and that mindset thrives throughout the mostly instrumental tracks of Ganglion. Violins and cello warble against a backdrop of sly beats in "A Necessary End" (while Matthews' wife Sarah provides wordless exultations during the bridge); a echo-drenched banjo, a sepia-tinged guitar and a crisp beat make "Remember Me?" seem like the incidental music for a showdown at the OK Corral as if The RZA was scoring Westerns. The Shakespearean-laden "A Hair on the Head of John the Baptist" and "Blood and Milk" play out like DJ Shadow doing soundtrack work on Elizabethan dramas.
"The Opening" is orchestral breakbeat, strings undulating in tempestuous space while wrestling with noisy drum programming; "Backyard Pond" glitches and hiccups with microtonal melodies while vinyl scratching bubbles around a warm synthesizer melody. In "Grafting," Matthews' string work evokes melancholic pastorals while Bristol-style trip-hop throw a 20th century haze over the idyllic landscape. Sarah's voice is lost in glossalia, ephemeral world-beat vocalizing that is so diaphanous that it never touches the ground.
For once, the press sheet hype ("quite possibly the finest release we've ever heard") doesn't seem like hyperbole. Ganglion is sumptuous listening -- rife with heartache and release, longing and liberation. Like Portishead or Massive Attack, Satillio brings trip-hop to the heartland and gives it a new home.
Saltillo
Suspicious Records [2006]
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