JAMES VELLA is, like the rest of us, concerned with the horrifically dark period we’re living through right now: the anxiety, the mental privations. The storm.
We all need to find a way through: on October 16th, under his recording pen-name A Lily, he releases an album advocating his complex and seductive musical approach to the crisis: Sleep Through the Storm.
It’s to be his fifth album, but his first for his new home at the London-Dorset label Bytes.
This week he’s unveiled the second single to be taken from that album, “Slept Through The Storm”. Take a listen below: it’s far from sleepy, though wonderfully transporting.
He whirls you offworld into an inexorably layering chatter of generative tones and melodies, meshed close, cracking, distorting, never anything but melodic, but wrapping you tight. It takes the minimalist theories of 60s’ advocates Terry Riley and others, and refashions those musical proposals for the post-rave generation and a more complex world.
James explains that the sleeping through is ” … surviving it, a moment of personal protection while the turbulences rage around us”. With this album as a vade mecum we can get through this.
A Lily’s Sleep Through The Storm will be released by Bytes on October 16th on digital and limited cassette formats, and may be pre-ordered now at the label’s Bandcamp page.
