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David Thomas Broughton

David Thomas Broughton vs. 7 Hertz

(Acuarela; US: 24 Oct 2007; UK: 23 Oct 2007)

In what’s been called a mini-album but is actually much closer to the real thing, David Thomas Broughton vs. 7 Hertz offers a series of sparse/dense experimental folk meditations. West Yorkshire-bred, London-based musician David Thomas Broughton has already put out a record of the sort that builds cults (2005’s The Complete Guide to Insufficiency), and here he’s even more obtuse. The collaboration with Leeds group 7 Hertz, which approaches jazz, classical and even klezmer music through improvisation, leads to a series of long (between 10 and 22 minutes), atmospheric compositions that take a single melodic idea, repeat a few times, and then let the musicians noodle around without obvious direction. Nevertheless, when he’s singing, Broughton’s voice is compelling – his mournful, vibrato-laden baritone a mix between Nick Drake and Antony. And as the pieces progress – “Weight of My Love” and the epic “River Outlet” especially – the music rises up to a point of glorious gothic cacophony, before catapaulting back to the original themes. If you have the patience to sit through a group like Jackie O Motherfucker’s extended deconstructions of American folk, you may also find in this collaboration a similar, clattering sort of hidden beauty.

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Dan Raper has been writing about music for PopMatters since 2005. Prior to that he did the same thing for his college newspaper and for his school newspaper before that. Of course he also writes fiction, though his only published work is entitled "Gamma-secretase exists on the plasma membrane as an intact complex that accepts substrates and effects intramembrane cleavage". He is currently studying medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia.


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David Thomas Broughton @ Primavera Sound 2007
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