Kevin Richard Martin - Sedatives (2020)

Like everyone staying afloat in this year with no head,,
Kevin Martin sought refuge from the madness.

By building beautiful loops as sonic sedatives, he constructed monastic psalms to battle the chaos triggered by the Co-vid pathogen.

Balletic,,hypnotic and revelling in the joy of drifting…this set of drone poems fully praise the analgesia of total sound immersion. Moving from solid to liquid to air, underwater jazz, iced ambient and mesmerically dubbed phase shifts, ooze both charm and melancholy. Casting irresistibly smeared frequency spells, left, right and centre, its a pleasure getting fully submerged in this quietly overwhelming album…

The relentlessly blurred undulations continuously filtered, throughout the twenty plus minutes of 20/20,
sounds like Maurizio meeting Gavin Bryars in the deepest pacific ocean trench, whilst Long Winter sounds like listening to ‘In a Silent Way’ in a wind tunnel on a snail paced, defective record deck with VERY large speaker boxes. Lastly, the final suite, ’Refractions 1 - 5’, deconstructs a dream fusion for AR Kane and Eno, adding dream machinery to the outward bound vibrations. Time is immaculately slowed down, reversed and tricked, within a sea of overdriven fx in Martin’s echo chamber…

Having only recently discovered KRM’s work via ‘Frequencies For Leaving Earth Vol.1’, its a pleasure to get sucked ever deeper, in to this K-hole. 'Sedatives' as a collection of nebulous musical mirages, offers fading, impressionistic water colours as rays of light in these dark times.