I was initially about to consign ‘The Lost Letters’ to the ever-growing bin of ‘things I probably won’t get around to reviewing’, having stuck on the first track and been fairly non-plussed. There’s some quite nice guitar playing, in a broadly unexciting way, and the sort of nondescript drumming that does little more than to provide the music with a weak and immaterial spine. The second track offers a similarly reduced aesthetic – some plodding bass and that sort of ephemeral female vocal that seems determined to question its own existence. Concluding it was sort of fine but perhaps a little lacking in substance, I decided to move on to more attention grabbing submissions… and then ‘Cut’ happened.
Like a window being opened to a previously unexplored garden, the third track of Ben J Heal and singer Fulya’s ‘The Lost Letters’ project is the kind of tune that strikes with such clarity as to make you reevaluate you preconceptions: suddenly, the project wasn’t just a little bland, it was wilfully underplayed, reductive as a mode of operation. Focussed on a single riff strummed upon an acoustic guitar, decorated with some repetitive drums and whispered vocals, ‘Cut’ succeeds in doing nothing, invoking a sort of kraut-rock slow-core, a fractured slice of some Jesus Lizard off-cut, a state rather than a structure. And that’s how to view ‘The Lost Letters’ – considered as a bunch of songs it’s a little unadventurous, a little lacking character. But viewing these are short abstractions, minor horizons in which the consciousness can loiter for just a few minutes, and the experience is profound.
Fans of dream-pop and other forms of lo-fi, meandering indie might get more from this, in a formal sense, than I will. That said, push past the constraints of genre, the desire to find music ‘interesting’, or ‘exciting’, and you’re left with a fairly wonderful collection of tracks, a hazy dive into murky pool of the obtuse and the obfuscated: emotive without being emotional, meandering without being aimless.
Listen: https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/the-lost-letters
Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully
meansmagazine.com 