Listening Post

A Dead Forest Index In All That Drifts From Summit Down (Southbound)

In a recent interview with The Guardian, New Zealand-born brothers Adam and Sam Sherry, who are A Dead Forest Index, were asked what they were listening to. Their answer – Arvo Part’s latest collection on ECM, Prokofiev, and Antony Hegarty – might surprise given that they are essentially a guitar and drums duo fleshing out the chorister’s voice of Adam.

However, the cover artwork and title of their debut album, In All That Drifts From Summit Down, does hint at the ECM-ish with its stark photograph and plain typography, Adam’s voice is as evocative and intoxicating as Hegarty’s.

There is also a cinematic sweep to their music that might not quite evoke Prokofiev but two tracks in, No Paths, an aching low-slung guitar and cello drifter, crawls along and then falls apart into the kind of dissonance that the Russian composer startled audiences with when he unveiled his second symphony. It’s quite startling how varied their highly textured musical palette is. Upon Dark Hills is a short but potent cyclic harmonium drone that recalls the harmonic intensity of the instrument most favoured as accompaniment by Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, Homage Old is a cold air swirler that’s grounded by a Cureish guitar rhythm, while Savage’s guitarist, Gemma Thompson, creates fuzzy swamps of warmness on Myth Retraced, one of two tracks she features on. Index under A, for awesome.