Colour risograph-printed paste-on cover on reverse-board white sleeves with handwritten titles, with black-and-white insert
2022 Jon Collin's LP release on Laboratorio Palestro. Repressed this year on Early Music.
Typically transportative new Jon Collin LP, recorded in Stockholm a few years ago. The JC vaults appear close to endless at this point - how much music is that in the past ten years or so now? - and more impressive still the quality of output, always rotating around similar themes and interests but somehow finding new intriguing modes of expression to draw you back in. The Other Dead Sea in part recalls the performances Collin delivered at our fifth birthday events last year, a compelling hybridisation of wordless Celtic folk song, fervoured blues and hypnotic drones that seems almost rapturous at times. Jon Collin as religious experience? Probably a bit OTT that, but since I'm no praying man I'll settle for the version of the eternal and the divine existent in 'The Lowering's' 19 minute medley (a medley! Just how infinite is the full thing?!) and the stately arcs of 'The Honour and Glory of Whaling' and hope that guarantees absolution. Amidst such uncertainty, Jon Collin proves himself a sure thing.
