Willamette - Always in Postscript

Screened at the 2011 Venice Film Festival and receiving special mention at the Singapore Beinalle in the same year, Charles Lim Yi Yong's film All the Lines Flow Out is described as "a stunning symphony of mesmerising images that seduces the viewer and leads him to the most unexpected and unusual visual travelogue of Singapore." Davin Chong, Kevin Chong and Joseph Yonker who have worked together as willamette since 2006 constructing tempered works with a romanticised classical edge, wrote always in postscript for the film.

Mastered by Taylor Deupree and released on Own Records, this is the trio's second full length work, the first being Echo Park released on Infraction Records last year. Recording of each work spanned roughly three years, 2006 - 2009, and 2009 - 2011 respectively, and if this is the result then the time has been spent well.

Beginning with a continuously descending set of melodic phrases, dense with many fathoms of pressure portrait of a sleeping girl with radio has something of a painterly title. Possessing the same graceful touch, light and refinement of a Degas for example, with the intimacy and vulnerability of a Lucien Freud. The swathes of rich sound have an affinity with the laters thick layers of oil paint, and melancholy held within his subject's eyes.

Looking back whilst floating in suspended time, always in postscript settles into a pattern of nostalgic daydream-scapes, conjuring imagery of past events and people. Even within itself, the album becomes self-referential, echoing chord progressions and notations in later tracks, developing the idea of a fugue or an all-encompassing nodal framework perhaps inspired by Lim Yi Yong's film of traversing the Singapore waterways.  There are moments when these seemingly interlocking pieces change trajectory, exerting stronger emotional forces upon the listener - a year of failure, a year of fortune shows us both sides of the elemental yin-yang, its violin phrases locking our gaze before fading into the distance.

Residue of ghosts leave their trace in objects and artefacts within these echoing rooms, willamette successfully capture this stirring intensity, rendering a gracefully architected work through these wonderfully minimal, yet cavernous pieces.

Released 21st January on limited 10" vinyl and digital formats.

http://ownrecords.com/
http://www.escapingthememory.org/