Phil Mouldycliff - Written On Water [ICR Distribution - 2008]Though his career as sound artists spans over 30 years with collaborations with the likes of Michael Nyman, Colin Potter and Keith Rowe along the way, amazingly this is Phil Mouldycliff’s first solo album of sound works. The six tracks on offer here fall somewhere between ambient, drone and haunting and sometimes a little quirky sound art. The tracks usual have a repeated drone texture or a simply harmonic structure be it tinkling/ creepy keyboards hits, music boxes unwinds,or prepared autoharp picks & hits. To which he adds muffled radio talk, texts/voices, or sampled distant choir voices. Along with murmurs of field recordings and small sonic sounds. The tracks seem to pefay a sometimes sinister, sometimes playful dreamy/ out- of –focus feel of nostalgia and bizarre memory recall, been surreal but not too obvious about it. It’s all fairly simple and at times pleasing naive in its construction and execution, yet extremely effective as he seems to create his very own strange out- of-time atmosphere and sonic place. Written On water is an 50 minute snapshot into the Mr Mouldycliff’s highly unique sonic world, lets hope it doesn’t take him another 30 years to produce some more solo work as this is highly original, atmospheric and just a little odd.    Roger Batty
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