brett naucke: the back of the garden

The recording style alone on Brett Naucke's The Back Of The Garden signals something individualistic and precise, before the sounds and patterns come across the compositional field. There’s distance and a clarity to the recording style, not any of the digital mid-range drag or noise-y ambience. The Back Of The Garden does not feel or sound at all live, but rather jumps off the speakers as solid period piece, the old style of “get into the studio and bang out a bunch of tracks over a few months.” The mixture of field recordings, arpeggiated anecdotes, and weird sound clusters add up to a quite Correct synth tape, but the compositional preciseness, as well as the general robustness and interest of the individual sounds, leads to something uniquely engaging. A saga wraps through every track: pretty, but in no way ambient, no builds to harshness, no collapses into drones. Each track on The Back Of The Garden stands as its own, while simultaneously giving a picture of the whole.