Jim Ghedi Destroy All Your Earthly Possessions

As someone who has made electronic music, when I first clasped my ear drums on this, I immediately realised this was a labour not just of love but of almost hypnotic devotion. The feeling of order from chaos that carries the whole album is mind bending. ‘Nevermind how he got there,’ was my inevitable answer, and I began to listen to it as an admirer.

The soul of the instrument, its taste and colour is what Jim Ghedi has found to be his muse. Rather than notes, melodies and scales, Destroy All Your Earthly Possessions gets around those roadblocks to provide a deeper and richer experience.

The perfect accompaniment to strong black coffee on a French boulevard, or on headphones while walking at night, this album is edgy. Flourishes of drama teeter on the brink of anticipating sampled sounds which bring an energy similar to dreaming. String and wind instruments are played to their boundaries, and when they fuse together for a brief splash in ‘Motion’, a rare symphonic climax is reached.

Like a piece of abstract art, from a distance it seems unfunctioning, but once you look harder and follow your senses, the conversation with the artist begins. Track titles like ‘Fatherless’ and ‘Patti’s Book, Window Seat’ reveal the unmistakeable work of a poet in music. The flow and cadence of the album is like metered verse, and as a whole this album can have you drifting into a romantic trance. Ending with the enticingly named ‘Arrival/Friends Embrace’, this universally familiar moment nudges us to make amends with our social lives.

Rowan Blair Colver