Shelter of the Opaque
Vanishing
| Formats | Tracks | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| CD Album | 8 tracks | £12.50 | |
| Download Album (MP3) | 8 tracks | £7.92 | |
| Download Album (WAV) | 8 tracks | £7.92 | |
| Download individual tracks | From £0.99 | ||
Description
Vanishing - Shelter of the Opaque
Vanishing's new album Shelter of the Opaque - released via The state51 Conspiracy
Vanishing is the unique creative project of Gareth Smith, a working class time-served engineer turned artistic world builder who has traded in his toolbox for the means to write evocative music and resonant lyrics. His stunning new album Shelter Of The Opaque seizes quotidian reality and either scrapes away at the veneer to reveal the awful machinery of how things are underneath or overlays it with a gossamer filigree to suggest how they could be instead.
The musician – who was born in Hull but now lives and works in Manchester and has worked previously with Lonelady and Gnod – dove deep into his family history on previous albums, 55°N, 5°E (2021) and Ends Without Redress (2023), to tell the story of his great grandfather George Henry Smith who died in the Dogger Bank Incident of 1904 when Russian warships mistook a fleet of British trawlers for the enemy and opened fire. But this time he knew that creative change was necessary.
Work started on building the skeleton of the album in 2018 with a session at the utopian cultural space, WORM in Rotterdam, featuring his trusty lieutenant, saxophonist Karl D’Silva (Drunk In Hell) and modular synth player Sam Weaver (Cuspeditions); while strings were added later by Abstract Concrete members Otto Willberg and Agathe Max plus Ecka Mordecai in Manchester. Smith guided the sessions via a series of simple imagistic commands, only adding his vocals after the music was done.
“I have a lot of energy to burn off”, says Smith, referring to the fact that many of the lyrics were composed while on epic walks round the cities of Manchester and Hull during the years of lockdown. “I look at it as a very Northern record”, he adds saying that other notable locations in the genesis included writing sessions at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Birkenhead, musical arrangements created with D’Silva in Rotherham with the final mix and mastering happening in Bradford. “Shelter Of The Opaque is an M62 record; the mills, the rivers, the cities, the spaces have all bled into it.”
The album is by turns more skeletal, more ambitious and more affecting than previous work, retaining some of Vanishing’s former berserk intensity and industrial grind, but as a single colour among many on a vivid new palette. Today the musical backing – which is as much informed by cold wave electronics, free jazz, Japanese ambient and discrete minimalism as it is by DIY noise – serves to aid Smith’s lyrics, not to obscure them, a seachange in process he puts down to “becoming more confident as a writer… more honest, more vulnerable. I was digging down deeper into personal subject matter that was rocking me about a bit more, searching for ideas with more emotional resonance.”
This invigorated attitude then spilled over into the act of sculpting the album as a whole: “I knew that if I was going to say these words with conviction then I’d have to create space around them, so the process to completion has been one of paring everything back, creating more and more space for them to breathe.” This technique was applied even to the way the vocals are delivered across tracks like Surgical, counterintuitively dampening down the emotional grain of his voice until the words alone, vibrating with restraint, were responsible for transmitting the intensity.
Lead single I Dream Of Circles, comes complete with a stark, purgatorial video which has the imagistic richness and gut punch of a Dogme-95 feature film but was, Smith reveals with a wry laugh, shot by him and a friend in his cramped flat near the Mancunian Way. The video, like the album’s austere artwork by Lewis McLean, reveals an all-encompassing attention to detail in every aspect of Vanishing. The track, which is the gravitational centre of the album around which all of the other tracks rotate, concerns Smith’s experiences with depression, talked of here as tigers.
Elsewhere Maxim, reveals a shining melodicism entirely new to the project backing a persuasive meditation on a departed friend conducted while walking through an ever shifting cityscape of brand new tower blocks of glass and steel; the song’s original drum beat removed to leave a simple heartbeat-like rhythm. The track finds its counterpart in Ten Month Winter another urban psychogeographic peregrination which asks what the genuine function of a contemporary city is for the working people who live in its environs.
The track Attica draws parallels between different associations of the place name: the Greek peninsula ravaged by one of the worst wildfires of the 21st century so far, and the American prison where 40 inmates and guards were mowed down by law enforcement gunfire after three days of rioting in 1971. He reveals that the final part of the process of stripping down the album to its absolute essence took place when the entire vocal track was removed from the closer Inertia, Inertia! “I listen to albums from start to finish, so I like to imagine other people do as well”, he reveals. “I wanted to create a space at the end of the record where people could take it in, a little space to reflect. And to showcase Karl’s playing of course.”
He concludes that perhaps the ideal delivery technology for the music will be earbuds for people who are on an urban walk themselves: “Shelter Of The Opaque is a very visual record. It sits on an intersection between a high narrative and atmospheric music, and this interacts with whatever it is the listener is looking at. The visual element was very important to me when I made the record, so I hope it will be to the people who listen to it.”
Words by John Doran
+ Available on CD w/ 4-page booklet
Vanishing is the unique creative project of Gareth Smith, a working class time-served engineer turned artistic world builder who has traded in his toolbox for the means to write evocative music and resonant lyrics. His stunning new album Shelter Of The Opaque seizes quotidian reality and either scrapes away at the veneer to reveal the awful machinery of how things are underneath or overlays it with a gossamer filigree to suggest how they could be instead.
The musician – who was born in Hull but now lives and works in Manchester and has worked previously with Lonelady and Gnod – dove deep into his family history on previous albums, 55°N, 5°E (2021) and Ends Without Redress (2023), to tell the story of his great grandfather George Henry Smith who died in the Dogger Bank Incident of 1904 when Russian warships mistook a fleet of British trawlers for the enemy and opened fire. But this time he knew that creative change was necessary.
Work started on building the skeleton of the album in 2018 with a session at the utopian cultural space, WORM in Rotterdam, featuring his trusty lieutenant, saxophonist Karl D’Silva (Drunk In Hell) and modular synth player Sam Weaver (Cuspeditions); while strings were added later by Abstract Concrete members Otto Willberg and Agathe Max plus Ecka Mordecai in Manchester. Smith guided the sessions via a series of simple imagistic commands, only adding his vocals after the music was done.
“I have a lot of energy to burn off”, says Smith, referring to the fact that many of the lyrics were composed while on epic walks round the cities of Manchester and Hull during the years of lockdown. “I look at it as a very Northern record”, he adds saying that other notable locations in the genesis included writing sessions at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Birkenhead, musical arrangements created with D’Silva in Rotherham with the final mix and mastering happening in Bradford. “Shelter Of The Opaque is an M62 record; the mills, the rivers, the cities, the spaces have all bled into it.”
The album is by turns more skeletal, more ambitious and more affecting than previous work, retaining some of Vanishing’s former berserk intensity and industrial grind, but as a single colour among many on a vivid new palette. Today the musical backing – which is as much informed by cold wave electronics, free jazz, Japanese ambient and discrete minimalism as it is by DIY noise – serves to aid Smith’s lyrics, not to obscure them, a seachange in process he puts down to “becoming more confident as a writer… more honest, more vulnerable. I was digging down deeper into personal subject matter that was rocking me about a bit more, searching for ideas with more emotional resonance.”
This invigorated attitude then spilled over into the act of sculpting the album as a whole: “I knew that if I was going to say these words with conviction then I’d have to create space around them, so the process to completion has been one of paring everything back, creating more and more space for them to breathe.” This technique was applied even to the way the vocals are delivered across tracks like Surgical, counterintuitively dampening down the emotional grain of his voice until the words alone, vibrating with restraint, were responsible for transmitting the intensity.
Lead single I Dream Of Circles, comes complete with a stark, purgatorial video which has the imagistic richness and gut punch of a Dogme-95 feature film but was, Smith reveals with a wry laugh, shot by him and a friend in his cramped flat near the Mancunian Way. The video, like the album’s austere artwork by Lewis McLean, reveals an all-encompassing attention to detail in every aspect of Vanishing. The track, which is the gravitational centre of the album around which all of the other tracks rotate, concerns Smith’s experiences with depression, talked of here as tigers.
Elsewhere Maxim, reveals a shining melodicism entirely new to the project backing a persuasive meditation on a departed friend conducted while walking through an ever shifting cityscape of brand new tower blocks of glass and steel; the song’s original drum beat removed to leave a simple heartbeat-like rhythm. The track finds its counterpart in Ten Month Winter another urban psychogeographic peregrination which asks what the genuine function of a contemporary city is for the working people who live in its environs.
The track Attica draws parallels between different associations of the place name: the Greek peninsula ravaged by one of the worst wildfires of the 21st century so far, and the American prison where 40 inmates and guards were mowed down by law enforcement gunfire after three days of rioting in 1971. He reveals that the final part of the process of stripping down the album to its absolute essence took place when the entire vocal track was removed from the closer Inertia, Inertia! “I listen to albums from start to finish, so I like to imagine other people do as well”, he reveals. “I wanted to create a space at the end of the record where people could take it in, a little space to reflect. And to showcase Karl’s playing of course.”
He concludes that perhaps the ideal delivery technology for the music will be earbuds for people who are on an urban walk themselves: “Shelter Of The Opaque is a very visual record. It sits on an intersection between a high narrative and atmospheric music, and this interacts with whatever it is the listener is looking at. The visual element was very important to me when I made the record, so I hope it will be to the people who listen to it.”
Words by John Doran
+ Available on CD w/ 4-page booklet