Hallock Hill - Kosloff Mansion - 1LP

So you sit each day in your working room, the house creaking, sighing - settling into itself around you. Occasionally you glance up, up into the trees, into the shifting light that plays across the damp stone of the house opposite - a house so long a part of your life and so quotidian as to be almost invisible. Gradually, you notice a new weight to your looking, a new dominance, your observances becoming their own kind of narrative. The looking imperceptibly folds itself into the work. The work becomes a response, a building of its own.

Kosloff Mansion is Tom Lecky’s fourth Hallock Hill album, and his second release for Hundred Acre Recordings. Kosloff Mansion could be said to be his first collaboration - in this case with The Lowland Hundred's Tim Noble. Lecky composed the music over a number weeks and, when approached to comment, Noble, instead of offering a response, simply asked if he could work his opinions into the pieces. The result is a multi-layered work, with Lecky’s light, fluid and gently ecstatic piano floating within the wider scope of Noble’s subtle sonic chambers/vaults. Each track glitters like a light-caught pool – the surface reflects and ripples but the internal ear is drawn to the greater stirrings in the depths. And yet, liquid metaphors aside, like much of Lecky’s previous work, the music never falls far from home and all that entails: comforts and losses, our own hauntings and the infinite shadings of memory.

Kosloff Mansion is a collaboration, but the joins are imperceptible – it feels like a whole work, imagined or otherwise. And like the crumbling stone it consecrates/calls forth, it will endure.