Small Finds #11

The light of Andrew Wasylyk

Photo by James Ross

The first time I met Andrew Wasylyk we walked through the Western Necropolis to Billy Mackenzie’s grave. I had taken a notion to write about the light in Dundee. Those winter sunsets! Like Mackenzie’s voice, they are intense, theatrical, heart-lifting, almost too much.

I wanted to talk with Wasylyk because the music he writes is full of that east coast light. You need only look at the names he gives his songs: Under High Blue Skies; Lost, Aglow; Dusk Above Delphinium Dew; The Violet Hour; Welter In The Haar.

His compositions are, for the most part, instrumental. He navigates a sound world that lies somewhere beyond the borders of classical and jazz, ambient and abstract. It is music that is difficult to describe, but easy to understand, which is to say to feel. That is the way Wasylyk’s music is experienced: as a feeling. You hear it and it takes you back to childhood, perhaps, to feelings of comfort and safety, or to memories of walks at sunrise and sunset, or to the way a shadow falls on a particular field in a particular place at a particular time in your life. It is consoling music. That is why, though it is pretty, it is not merely pretty. These are songs to shore up the soul.

The light in Dundee is special. Everyone who lives there or goes there on the right day knows this. There’s the casual magic of what it does to stone. The DC Thomson tower glows above the Howff. Skulls and angels and anchors cast long shadows across gravestones. A couple walk hand in hand along the Tay, past the V&A, the glitter of water strafing the museum’s striated flanks.

Wasylyk writes in a room in Dundee. It is full of half-broken instruments. He wanders around, picking these up, playing a little, seeking an idea, a feeling, a door that lies ajar.

He is in his forties: modest, earnest, sweet. We sat in a café once and he quoted a poem by his friend Liz Lochhead – ‘all we know is: love surprises us. It’s like when sunlight flings/A sudden shaft that lights up glamorous the rain ...’ Those passing moments, those intangibles, are what he is chasing in his work.

His new album Irreparable Parables is kin to his 2020 record Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation. One of the instrumentals on the new record, First Moonbeams of Adulthood, is ‘a shadow twin’ – so he puts it – of the earlier album’s Last Sunbeams of Childhood. The musical palette of Irreparable Parables includes brass and woodwind, a six-piece string section, guitar, bass, drums, vibraphone, Mellotron, Fender Rhodes, tape loops, synthesisers and percussion. The strings were arranged by the cellist Pete Harvey, a long-term collaborator.

At a concert in early March, at the Pleasance theatre in Edinburgh, Wasylyk and his six-piece ensemble performed a few of these rich, complex new compositions. To see the musicians lock in together was to admire the intricate workings of a clock.

Irreparable Parables is in some ways a departure. Wasylyk felt a strong desire to write a set of songs featuring an element hitherto rare in his work: the human voice. Equally strong was the conviction that he did not want to sing them himself.

He set about assembling a group of guest singers, sending out the songs to wherever they were in the world. The vocals were recorded remotely and then, like migrating birds, winged their way back to Scotland. The result is an album of great beauty which, perhaps preeminently in Wasylyk’s work, expresses the vulnerability and resilience of the human spirit.

That was most evident, during the Pleasance show, when the band was joined on stage by Kathryn Joseph to perform Spectators In The Absence Of God. I cannot tell you how she sang. One might as well try to describe how frost creeps, how blood seeps. Her voice was warming, chilling, insistent, alive.

Spectators is the heart of the record, an ‘apocalyptic hymn’ – as Joseph introduced it – that seems to grapple with watching human suffering from afar, too distant to be at physical risk, but experiencing the psychological wounding, and feelings of helplessness, even complicity, that come with constant awareness of other people’s pain.

The final song of the night, Wasylyk said, would be one of hope because, well, we could all use some of that. Then the band played Awoke In The Early Days Of A Better World and, afterwards, back out in the dreich, we carried the frail light of that music into the Edinburgh dark.

Andrew Wasylyk is on tour: Marryat Hall, Dundee, March 7; The Attic, Leeds, March 8; Pan-Pan, Birmingham, March 10; Lantern Hall, Bristol, March 11; Rich Mix, London, March 12; Gosforth Civic Theatre, Newcastle, March 13. Irreparable Parables is out now.