Haiku Salut

★★★★

The Hill, The Light, The Ghost SECRET NAME. CD/DL/LP

Engagingly wistful fifth album from Derbyshire Dales instrumental trio. Starting life as a series of field recordings captured in charged locations – an abandoned house in Germany, the birdsong-framed Peak District countryside – The Hill, The Light, The Ghost is pitched as “a miniature exploration of sound in relation to memory”. From this near-Proustian premise, multi-instrumentalists Louise Croft, Sophie Barkerwood and Gemma Barkerwood conjure nine wordless, shape-shifting essays using keyboards, electronics, guitars and orchestral instruments. Opener Wide Awake’s raindrop piano and enveloping strings recall Virginia Astley’s pastoral

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, while genre-refuting We Need These Beams marries sepulchral electric guitar to fluttering circuitry and All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, named after a Richard Brautigan poem (or perhaps a subsequent Adam Curtis documentary), layers its synths, glitchy melodies and bell-like tones into a soaring, heart-swelling crescendo – stadium ambient, if you will.