When Bjork sang of an ‘Army of Me’, it evoked not just the powers she could summon if wronged, but also her multiplicity as an artist. That is still more the case with the enigmatic, dazzlingly versatile artist, Seaming To. Though working here mostly solo, she has the capacity of a full ensemble, not just in terms of her remarkable vocal range and multi-instrumental virtuosity, but in her ability to shapeshift effortlessly, to merge between genres, and change colour at will. Dust Gatherers is a unique achievement, an album of unclassifiable, magic-realist avant-pop. Drawing on and alluding to classical, jazz, blues, pop, and electronica, Dust Gatherers always wears its eclecticism weightlessly, airily, dreamily... Beguiling, evocative, emotionally fraught, but never putting a foot wrong, Dust Gatherers is an Army of Her.
To manifest Seaming To’s singular vision, Dust Gatherers is assisted in part by critically acclaimed guest musicians: Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford (slide guitar and electronic effects), Homelife’s Matthew Batty (violin), Justin Lingard (viola) and Paddy Steer (double bass, pedal steel guitar), Olivia Moore (violin), and Semay Wu (cello). The album begins with ‘AnOverture’, which feels like a portal into Seaming’s dreamworld. Imagine entering a wormhole, the nightworld of Charles Ives’ ‘Central Park in the Dark’, perhaps a dark corridor of glistening chimes, before processed strings – deep and consoling – rise to a reverberant crest, then fall in an elegant heap.This is a place full of love and longing. ‘Blessing’ affirms this, with its wish for us to be conferred “in our sleep with rest/in our dreams with vision/in our waking with a calm mind...” It’s a prayer, laden with all the qualities for which it asks. Set against a simple, but heavenly choral see-saw, To overlaps herself, with overdubs and harmonies, ascending into the upper register and splitting up into several beings. ‘Tousles’ follows, occupying an ethereal realm between the real and the processed, the pure and the synthesised, the minimal and the voluptuous, an arpeggiated weave of silk, metal and plastic.There are hints of The Associates’ Billy Mackenzie in the soulful Sturm and Drang of her vocals – silvery, Busby Berkeley magical. ‘Brave’, meanwhile, sees her sub-divide once again into multiple voices – spectral, supernatural, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale etched in keyboards.
On ‘Traveller’, there are strong hints of the solitude of her project, the journey she undertakes through her fertile imagination, with only her own echo and overdub for company. With ‘Water Flows’ that journey takes a faintly sinister turn, with intimations of the nocturnal river scene in Charles Laughton’s Night Of The Hunter. And then there’s 'xenanmax', a quite unexpected instrumental interlude. Abstract, metallic, it’s like a piece of machinery in the process of assembling, or perhaps disassembling itself. It makes way for the fulsome ‘Hitchhiker’, a thing of candelabra elegance, chamber orchestral. There are faint echoes of Kate Bush in the way that it swoops with a sort of doomed, emotional recklessness, before briefly threatening to morph into Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’, before another door opens to reveal a glittering trove of musical detail. ‘Look Away’ proceeds to the muted, eerie tones of funeral parlour music, its lyrical narrative unfolding over a splintered, glitchy backbeat. But then, on ‘Pleasures Are Meaningless’ – as if now fully awake – Seaming resorts to the lucidity of an untreated piano, addressing us with the melancholic intimacy of a torch song, or a Chet Baker reverie. She seems to question the very nature of her enterprise, beautiful as it is, but hankering exquisitely in vain. Finally, there’s ‘Tenderly’, on which woodwinds sway gently, buffeted by static interference. A concluding, uneasy calm. Dust Gatherers is a brilliant album which reveals its myriad charms immediately, but not all of its secrets, or the depths of its interior world, rewards that come with further, repeated listenings.
