DAVID BICKLEY - STILL RIVERS AT NIGHT
July 12th, 2006 by LenaK
A recurring experience for me at the Chill (and I’m guessing I’m not the only one) is that feeling of utter contentment when the sun-drenched afternoon drains into the golden orange of sunset. More often than not I’m laying down, propped up on my elbows surveying the scene in front of the sanctuary or chill stages, as a soothing body-temperature breeze wafts over me, billowing out brightly coloured flags, and seducing me, like a bisto kid, with a million exotic and tantalising smells. Warm dubby grooves and gently broken beats swirl around my head with people talking and laughing all around me in surround sound. I’m here, all earthly cares are a million miles away and I don’t think it’s possible to be more chilled.
There could are thousand different tunes that could be providing the soundtrack to this moment, and a handful of those thousand could be from ‘Still Rivers at Night’ by David Bickley, just released on the Irish label, Psychonavigation. This warming brew of dub infused ambient is the latest work from a man whose interest in film and music making extends back twenty-odd years and it has everything you need for those blissed out moments of slow-burning satisfaction. Standout moments are the delicate unfolding of ‘The Leap’, the pulsing and arcing arpeggios of the title track and the gel-sol-esque ‘Zebo-black’. The quality isn’t consistently high throughout: there are a couple of tracks (such as ‘Babygroove’) that don’t really go anywhere and it would be a much better album with the occasional dashes of heavily processed guitar noodling removed. That said there’s more than enough here to make a killer EP and keep me flat on my back, in a field in Eastnor, in August, wondering at the beauty of it all.
Jez Wells
David Bickley - Still Rivers at Night is out now.
