Little Skull - Resurrected Bells LP (Pre-Order)

Intimacy can be a complicated word in relation to music; it can be construed to mean cloyingly emotional and overly forthcoming, or it can mean just so quiet it nearly isn’t there. It can also describe things ineffable, evocative of experiences most of us have but few of us share. It’s a loaded word, but one so central to music that it’s sometimes essential in finding the core of sound. It’s important here to delineate intentional intimacy (which is often affected and contrived) versus a kind of intimacy that is natural, simply the essence of the music, from performance to experience.

That is the kind of intimacy within Little Skull’s Resurrected Bells. It is beautifully subtle. It is sometimes pastoral and it would lend itself well to film score work—evocative with a familiarity just out of reach, at times unsettling and haunting.

Dean Brown hails from Hamilton, New Zealand, but currently makes his home in London. I’ve never been to New Zealand, but (like William Blake’s England) it’s legendary as a “green and pleasant land”, at least in its vast back country. It’s also legendary, to those of us who’ve been listening, for its rich musical underground—music created out of the need to create rather than the need to be heard because, for so many New Zealand artists, the country has lacked an audience for the art they’re compelled to make.

As Little Skull, Dean Brown has been releasing music and visual art (often in tandem) for nearly 25 years and he has been consistently imaginative; simultaneously of the avant garde and somewhat opaquely rooted in antiquity. These qualities have been refined with time and as the 2020’s have advanced, so has the richness of Little Skull’s sound. This has brought him to Resurrected Bells, a record full of both elegance and discord. The album's tracks bear names that are at times funereal and woeful, which aligns with Brown’s sometimes gothic (-not Goth-) sensibilities. 

Here, with guitar, organ (sometimes harkening the harmonium), violin, piano, banjo, tape loops, percussion (including a tongue drum) and an armful of other instruments, Brown has created an atmosphere that is delicate and quietly striking. The music can feel equally forlorn and tranquil, but never desolate and forsaken to my ears.

This is the work of an artist with a keen sense of texture and space. It is a far distance from ambient music; it feels rural and somewhat deserted, like music that exists in tandem with a place and not with a person.