WITH a months-long concept of dropping one single track every month on the pilgrimage towards their 2022 album, Swiss post-rock trio HOLM have followed up the cinematic and metronomic wash of May’s “Our Days And Years” with a second station of the cross for you to sonically supplicate before, “Flickering Leaves”, which we’ve got right here for you today.
It’s a light-dappled and mellow shimmer, very much in the pre-hard mathrock sense of post-rock, a beautiful strand of the genre in its original blossoming which seems to have fallen by the wayside a little in the urge to really bust ass with amplification; be thinking Che-era Bark Psychosis, very much even Behold The Spirit-era William Tyler even; it really is all about the beauty of gently arpeggiating guitar lost in smoky atmospherics. Quite, quite lovely. Which is apt, since it’s coming out on Quiet Love.
Holm’s second album, IN GARDENS, is set for release in January 2022; with six more tracks pupating prior to release across the changing seasons.
Recorded live and in one take, the delicate beauty of Holm’s new set, developed in a former bomb shelter beneath the loud excesses of the Swiss financial capital, Zürich, unfold and bloom in the middle ground between the taut and the rhythmic and the billowing and the impressionistic.
The three-piece, comprised of drummer Alessandro Giannelli, guitarist Dimitri Käch and bassist James Varghese subvert the beetling cityscape in sound, writing and recording in that former refuge in the middle of the city; dreaming of determined escape from it.
Like the other seven tracks laid down for In Gardens, “Flickering Leaves” was borne entirely of improvisational sessions recorded live. From now until the new year, through summer, autumn and winter, Holm will drip-feed one track every month.
The band’s shelter-cum-creative base sits subterranean to the conspicuous wealth of Zürich’s Paradeplatz base, one of mainland Europe’s most expensive postcodes, and thus perhaps the ideal place to explore the majesty and darkness of post-rock; right in the belly of the beast.
The band’s name, Holm, the old Norse word for an islet, describes part of the band’s small-p political and musical purpose in one syllable; a remove, surrounded on all sides; a retreat, small, secluded.
The band formed in 2018 and has no predetermined goals, except to share a musical and emotional journey. They say HOLM is a place to catch a fleeting glimpse of another truth, a location from which perspectives may change.
HOLM’s “Flickering Leaves” is out on digital streaming platforms now via Quiet Love Records.
Connect with HOLM at their official website, at Bandcamp, and on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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