Review: Richard Moult + David Colohan - Hexameron

Each sound on Hexameron is like a cliff edge, leaving ever step of my journey in transitory uncertainty and suspension. Moments are held open in the weightless expectation that the future will come to catch them – pianos hang with held breaths, with open chords beckoning the response that will endorse its next step forth, while gleaming guitars span out like a path into fog, setting out a journey of intuition and instinct rather than with the explicit prize of destination in mind. The album is a state of wandering, embracing transit as its own sort of stasis; a waltz with landscape, acquainting itself with every soft tuft and fractured edge of its surroundings to find peace in the constant unraveling of heritage and sensory detail.

I am brought to mental images of contemplative pastoral plains – rolling, uninhabited hills, with choir voices gathering like vapour in the conjoining valleys. The erosion of time haunts every instrument here, with a coarse static coat alluding to the history to which every fractional detail of its placement and texture is in debt; even though there’s an improvisational quality to the distorted guitar leads that rip open the music’s midriff, and to the piano melodies that trace the constant arpeggiating gradients of the landscape itself, there is also a strong presence of pre-destiny, as though Hexameron is gliding gracefully down the spiritually assured channel of fate. The moments of climax feel like the points at which vague sensation comes into meaning; where belief thickens into certainty, turning every searching step into an enlightened onward motion.