olan mill: home

The Preservation label presents Home, the third album from Olan Mill from Hampshire in the United Kingdom. Olan Mill is the recording project of composer and producer Alex Smalley, who to-date has received rapturous acclaim for his work that holds a sublime measure between the realms of modern neo-classical composition and ambience. On Home, Smalley has mined his most expansive territory yet to create a thrillingly evocative and deeply felt body of work. The tender clusters of sound that have defined Olan Mill's tonal space take on a new soaring quality in using voice to propel Home with a new emotional surge. Alongside soprano Patricia Boynton featuring throughout, Smalley has assembled an ensemble of musicians playing woodwind, piano, pipe organ and violin to augment his guitar and field recordings. Together they combine for both moments of heart-rending intimacy and bursts of flowering, floating orchestral sound. Inspired by travels abroad, Home is a both an urban and exotic panorama, keening with waves of joyous energy and direct pulse, as well as the ultimate comedown from such pure euphoria. Recorded by Smalley in his home -- a place lived in by his family in generations past -- the album has an earthy air that magically weaves through its otherworldly radiance to portray the compelling dynamic at the heart of Olan Mill. Home is the fifth work in Preservation's limited edition CD series Preservation called "Circa for 2012." Only 300 copies of each release in the series will be available and will feature a design by Mark Gowing. Each design is realized using an abstract alphabet that creates an interlocking grid, determined by artist and volume number for something both fixed, random and unified across the entire series.

Pampas (Rurre) - Olan Mill