David Newlyn is an outstanding ambient composer from Durham in the UK, one who engages with ideas as much as the community around him – church choir practice, waiting rooms, leafy (if “disintegrating”) suburbs. He is a “cobbler of everyday emotion,” I once wrote, whose tools are synthesizers and computers, keyboards and guitar and field recordings. Encouraged to Lose is familiar in its quietly radical treatment of sounds, its textures rough-hewn and air moted with dust, but unusual in its distinctly downcast demeanor. It opens with the fragile, lightly treated piano of “March.” “Under a Lifeboat Pier” sounds like a tranquil spot in which to find oneself were it not for the ominous album title. “A Secluded Scene” revisits the piano, two simple notes supported by a warm undertow and joined by a softly conversing guitar (unless it’s a synthesizer). Lengthiest and most cryptic are “A Strange Kind of Confusion,” an off-center piece that wends a woozy way; and “17th Out of 19,” a grainy, short-waved elegy over which plays another simple, lonesome melody, sizzling with electromagnetic interference. Not that his previous work has lacked introspection, but Encourage to Lose, another excellent collection sensitively rendered, feels downright withdrawn.
Stephen Fruitman
Avant Music News 