Reactionary Reviews | 1977 | Derek Gripper & Felix Laband
1977 is an ambient bromance a decade in the making. The first major work for Laband since Deaf Safari (at best The Soft White Hand often felt like outtakes from that album), this duet soundscape with Derek Gripper, the guitar master of transposition, is just fucking gorgeous. Perhaps collaboration is what Felix Laband has always been searching for.
Sparse and filigree, 1977 is deft in simplicity. Two musicians playing their instruments in a room recorded to tape, no tricksy looping from one to the other, Gripper's delicate acoustic string reworkings of Bach, Sissoko, et al, are intertwined with Laband's restrained sonic soundscapes, interspersed with muted vocal samples of readings from news presenters, political agitators and a reading of statistics, and even these are sonically under the surface, seeping into the brain. At first listen this might resonate as bubble-bath ambience, but it is not.
Gripper's always remarkable rejection of standard song forms seems to have given Laband permission to expand without clutter. Birdsong, echoes of Madrugada Eterna, over and under flutters of strings, forget the source of the sound. A wind gathers from the river to the sea.