n Quiet City Mark Nelson escapes from the womb of dub infected throbs and mite-like rustlings that he seemed hopelessly wedged in on previous outings. For the moment, Nelson, a member of the prominent Labradford, would seem to have found lodgings in an eerie dark ambient space that weaves muffled electronics as well as stately organic sound sources such as organ, guitar and trumpet, together with funeral tempos and grave moods. In a stunted sketch, Quiet City is a deft display of intense stasis where submerged melodic fragments poke through smears of high frequency noise and scratchy delay trails.

To the concise “Before”, with a clean chiming guitar hobbling into a light spell of salty digital hailstones, Nelson plants his gruff poetic whisper. “Smallholding” furthers the stormy theme with a nimble electronic patter that sounds like raindrops falling down on a metal window ledge. An austere organ drone emerges alongside rumbling drums and flitting background noises that sound, oddly, to be a faltering boat propeller slapping against the water. All of this is engulfed in a hissing static until a resonant hum drifts into silence.

Quiet City is a notable recording due to its successful marriage between electronic and organic instrumentation. Nelson is able to create a fluid, living sound that may no longer be ‘electronic’ according to all cold, machine stereotypes, nor ‘organic’ in the sense that it’s the effect of a live recital on traditional instruments. Among the streaked synthesizer splutters and sharp high drones of “Hall And Skylight”, the melancholy European hues conveyed by David Max Crawford’s breathy sax and Tim Mulvennas propulsive drumming adds a desirable variation that was absent on previous efforts. Similarly, on “Inside Elevation” lethargic European guitar plucking and lonely melodica tread through a dense fog of perturbed ambiance, while sporadically slashed at by digital stitches from an unseen party. It’s visual music that instantly evokes walks through ghost towns once inhabited and now swallowed up by clouds of dust that swim through eroding brick as the trekker, listening to all crumble, searches through the rubble.

Nelson demonstrates patience by withholding Quiet City’s best compositions until last. As they lace gossamer threads of melody throughout “Retouch”, aquatic keyboard patterns perform a waltz around Crawford’s rough flugelhorn cries. “Christo en Pilsen” also finds Quiet City perched atop its summit. Somewhat of a lullaby sung by echoing acoustic guitar and quivering electronic chirps, rhythms chatter and flutter through this iridescent structure. An album of distorted tone clusters, occasionally showered by dissonance, Quiet City finds quiet charms in fading memories.