O, Little Stars by Keiron Phelan, David Sheppard (Review)
Like the name implies, O, Little Stars is an album of tiny intentions and small ambitions, often so slight that it’s easy to dismiss its soft, fluttering soundscapes. And indeed, I’ve been apt to overlook its little, unassuming charms. But tonight, things are a little different. For some reason, I picked this disc off the shelf, perhaps just looking for some nice background music whilst doing some tired e-mailing and forum-hopping before dragging myself to bed.
However, the album’s charms have slowly begun to unfold for me. I’ve always liked the opening track “Azizintla Fireflies,” and way its slightly-blurred analog tones flutter about as if buffeted by a light spring breeze. And “Zurich Sunday” is such a short, quiet song that its wrenching impact seems quite incongruous, but there’s something in the way the melody moves through its scale that seems immeasurably sad.
Other tracks, though, have eluded me. Until tonight, that is. Tonight, “Sleep” is quite the apropos track, its shimmering, Steve Reich-esque bells and piano lines having quite the lullaby effect, suggesting the onset of slumber and the dreams that might come with it. The playful keyboard tones on “Snowfall Over…” do somehow suggest big, fluffy flakes descending from a grey sky, while its rhythms — which sound glitchy, but on further inspection are too clean for that — have the same delightful crunch that your boots make as you tromp through the banks.
“How Many Hands?” is one of the more raucous tracks on the album, but only due to the swarming drones that occasionally stretch and elongate themselves over the track’s more ethereal elements. The field recordings, barely-plucked guitars, and background noise that makes up “O, Little Stars 2” recalls Lucid’s somnambulistic meanderings, whereas the string-laden “Torrent” contains shades of Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand — had that album been inspired by Antarctica during the long, dark winters. Finally, “Matute, Nebraska“ ‘s clattering percussion, seemingly random-yet-never misplaced keyboard notes, and breathy flutes resembles a lighter, more forgiving track from Supersilent.
If there’s one complaint with O, Little Stars, it’s that the album never feels like a whole, it never feels like anything other than a compilation of intriguing sound installations. Each piece is wholly unique, completely unrelated with the other tracks except, on occasion, by name. This is largely due to the fact that O, Little Stars was actually culled from a series of experimental pieces that Phelan and Sheppard did between 1996 amd 2001.
But that might also be part of the album’s charm. Each piece — “song” doesn’t seem like quite the right term here — feels wholly its own, completely singular in its existence, a little trembling world of sound waiting for the listener to reach the moment when it might make a bit more sense.