- London-based Donato Wharton produces slow, beatless compositions using guitar and electronics that sit somewhere between the fuzz-drenched wash of Fennesz and more song-based work by the likes of Mogwai or My Bloody Valentine. These sorts of excursions are becoming increasingly commonplace, but there's plenty of room for variation and there are many successes, Tim Hecker, Minamo and Klimek to name three.
'Bodily Isolations', Wharton's second album, takes its title from a contemporary dance term and aims to draw a parallel between the movement in dance of individual body parts and the manner in which a listener can focus their attention on particular sonic details. Wharton explains: 'Each track exists as a concentrated expression [...] from dreaming and inertia, through to yearning and aloofness.' On record, this translates as a 'dreamy-aloofness' throughout; a cold, isolationist exercise. However, within each piece Wharton shows particular skill at handling a number of different elements, blending these into fragile, inviting compositions.
'Absentia' opens with drifting clouds of radio static and amplifier hum. The press blurb references William Basinski although, pretty as this is, Wharton's work is earthbound and modest by comparison. Guitar timbres become clearer on 'Blue Skied Demon', where sparse melodic patterns weave between ghostly shadows of themselves before a David-Sylvian-like voice intones something incomprehensible but pleasantly droll. Fractured piano keys creep between chiming guitar notes in the pointillistic 'Transparancies', 'Sidereal' is deconstructed blues along Ekkehard Ehlers lines, while the bucolic pads and cushioned church bells of 'Puget Sound' could sit comfortably on a ‘Pop Ambient’ collection, were it not for the free-formed edgy guitar scratchings.
Wharton seems less concerned with creating long swathes of controlled feedback than Fennesz (although the industrial grind of 'Underwave' bears a similarity) than with emphasising short, repeated melodic fragments, however obtuse these may be. Tracks here do not progress or resolve like songs, however, and consequently things can feel aimless. Despite this, it's an easy album in which to lose oneself in hazy melancholia.