CD: Odd Nosdam - Trish

Originally available on cassette only, Odd Nosdam's Trish has now become the producer and former member of hip-hop pioneers cLOUDDEAD's first release for the Sonic Cathedral label. With six tracks coming in at just under half an hour, it falls into the hinterland between EP and album – a kind of musical novella. This means that there are certain constraints at play here, yet the shortened format is, in reality, a strength.

It allows for a particular continuity of style and a cohesive tone, which lends the songs a tangible story arc – something that feels entirely fitting for a work in which Nosdam (David P Madson) pays homage to a life.

The life in question is that of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan, whose death from pneumonia in 2011 was an unexpected and tragic loss of a singular talent and one accompanied by an acute sense of shock and disbelief.

There’s no mawkish, cloying sentiment here, though – this is the anti-“Candle in the Wind”. Trish is a collection of occasionally difficult, delightfully tricksy and often magical pieces of music that capture and reflect the extraordinary and otherwordly sense of sonic exploration that Keenan’s work epitomised. The dense layers fall like a curtain through which we can glimpse meaning and melody: from the delicately discordant drone of opener, “T a i k a i r”, to the stuttering loops of “L o n j a e”, that sound like they’ve been carefully cut on the bias, right through to the eponymous closer, with its bass-buoyed birdsong, cutting through the distortion and leaving us something that is both dirty and glacial.

In fact, contrasts seem to define Trish in many ways. It’s music that teases and tantalises and asks questions of its audience, while simultaneously soothing us… encouraging us to feel more than think – like a bedtime story comprised entirely of subtext and metaphor. It is, at times, opaque and murky, yet possesses a clear and uncomplicated beauty and is an utterly convincing combination of instinct and intellect. A worthy tribute indeed.