Making Waves

Luke Daniels’ Revolve and Rotate EP featured the sounds of the extraordinary Polyphon, a sort of vaudevillian organic-analogue synth – and that concrete approach to sound informs this new album, for which more than 500 individual pieces of open-source archived or sampled audio were collected together and processed, detuned, warped and layered to create Making Waves. On top of this electric sound tapestry of Scottish, Irish and American folk musicians from the last century (recorded by the BBC, RTE and Alan Lomax), a team of live players including John Doyle, Mike McGoldrick and Aidan O’Rourke weave tunes and melodies. As such, it is a fascinating answer to earlier sound tapestry experiments drawing from field music –Martyn Bennett’s classic Grit comes to mind – though Daniels has a decidedly 21st-century approach to archive and contemporary acoustic melding together. The techniques may be similar but the purpose is its own. The more adventurous, out-there mash-ups work best, while the jigs played straight are less compelling. Daniels is a musician and composer who thrives at the borders of what is familiar and strange, and the best of Making Waves resides there.