#music

The opening of "Northern Sky" — a keyboard figure that sounds to me like a celesta, though I have never confirmed the credit — drifted through the kitchen speaker while I was washing up, and I stopped. That was enough to put Bryter Layter (Nick Drake, 1970) on properly: volume up a little, window open onto the street, seated at the table rather than moving through the room.

Bryter Layter is the arrangement record in Drake's small catalogue. Robert Kirby wrote the string charts — the same Kirby from the debut — and John Cale contributes throughout, though I find it difficult, without the liner notes in front of me, to say where Kirby's warmth ends and Cale's cooler sensibility begins. The album moves between those two registers without resolving them, and that tension is most of what makes it interesting. The instrument that opens "Fly" — harpsichord, I have always assumed, though possibly something else — sounds as though it came from a different century and somehow doesn't feel like a mistake.

The record isn't trying to build toward anything. It works room by room, and that is its method. What I sometimes want from it is a track that breaks the temperature, and "Hazy Jane II" comes closest — the rhythm section opens out in a way nothing else on the album quite manages, and the whole thing briefly feels propulsive. It sounds to me like the record testing what it might have been.

There is a moment about three minutes into "Cocoon" where the microbeat — assembled, I understand, from found percussion: cutlery, ice, small domestic sounds — drops to almost nothing, and Björk's voice holds alone for a bar before the harps return. I was listening through headphones at around eleven last night, the flat otherwise quiet, and that suspension landed differently than it has ever landed through speakers. The channel separation seemed to make the gap feel physical, like a held breath.

Vespertine, Björk, 2001, co-produced with Mark Bell and Matmos. Formally, it is an interior record. The textures are assembled close: music-box figures, celesta, a chamber choir used more as atmospheric wash than as comment, beats constructed from small household sounds rather than synthesised or struck. The governing reference isn't a stage or a club but a room sealed against winter — which is a slightly strange thing to return to in early September here, when the evenings are still cold but the light is beginning to extend into something more hopeful.

What the album does well is sustain pressure without volume. The voice is placed very near the ear, nearly spoken in places, and the arrangement stays behind it — breathing rather than surrounding. The dynamic range runs narrow in an unusual direction: quiet to quieter. There's no build-and-drop; the architecture works through accumulation and careful withdrawal.

The opening of "My Foolish Heart" on Waltz for Debby — Bill Evans, live at the Village Vanguard, June 1961 — still stops me on every listen. Evans doesn't announce the melody so much as locate it, feeling for something in a familiar but darkened room. Then the tune settles, unhurried, already at ease with itself.

I put the record on last Sunday around four, when Melbourne's autumn light had gone that flat, quietly withdrawing grey. Headphones rather than speakers: I wanted the Vanguard's room sound closer than my own walls. On headphones, Scott LaFaro's bass reads less as accompaniment and more as a second conversation running alongside Evans' own — responsive, often anticipating. Paul Motian's brushwork nearly vanishes, which is perhaps as it should be.

The record isn't trying to be a landmark, and I resist the weight critics keep placing on it — the tragedy of LaFaro's death eleven days after the session, the sense of something frozen at the edge of loss. Taken on its own terms, it is a working trio playing well in a small room, and you can hear that ease throughout.