SEL BALAMIR
Swell ROCKOSMOS
JACQUES COUSTEAU ENDS WITH TREMENDOUS 70S PROG MELODIC SYNTH.
Amplifier’s frontman takes his first solo dive.
Growing up in London, the young Sel Balamir would look forward to summer holidays; visits to his Turkish family, spent by the Mediterranean Sea where he always felt “at home”. Although Balamir’s life soon revolved around city-based recording and touring, given the chance to grab his own slice of oceanic action, he took it. So while the studio used for Amplifier’s progressive rock-based adventures was still in his old (other) stamping ground of Manchester,
Balamir and his family moved to a new home yards away from the sea on the Sussex coast. He’s now a frequent visitor to the waves, having found a passion for windsurfing.
It’s no surprise then that Balamir’s debut solo record hones in on this fascination. The subject’s seeped into past Amplifier work – abstractly with 2006 track Strange Seas Of Thought, directly with 2011 album The Octopus – but with the three tracks of Swell, he’s fully immersed.
In truth, Balamir had little choice in how to create Swell.
Lockdown 2020 meant no face-to-face collaboration with his bandmates for a follow-up to their last release, 2017’s Trippin’ With Dr Faustus, and the “change in circumstance” noted in the bio for this record was Covid. Unfortunately, Balamir was among millions affected by the virus in the first wave. While he recovered, he grabbed a laptop and wrote. Eventually, his acoustic and electric guitars came into play, then equipment from Manchester was relocated close to home, and Swell was completed alone.
‘Well, life is like a mountain coming down on top of my head,’
he sings during the title track. The 20-minute anchor for the album, it begins as a six-note acoustic arpeggio with a subbass pulse, plus ‘chirrups’ and wind. Percussionless post-rock segues into an uplifting church organ section, slide guitar arches in and electronica washes swoop over. ‘Somewhere over the horizon the sun is waiting for the dawn to come’ - that ‘dawn’ brings a microtonal guitar solo and an otherworldly choir, resolving in a shoegazey shuffle with synthesiser fizz.
The name Jacques Cousteau will conjure images of the popular undersea explorer for many of a certain age, and on the song of the same name Balamir assembles a bossa novabased track of tingling triangles, woozy organ and guitar and rippling piano à la Saint-Saëns’ Aquarium, finishing with a tremendous 70s prog melodic synth part.
Finally, Seagull looks to the skies near Balamir’s house.
The birds’ cries penetrate dense and reverberating synth chords before a stately post-rock blues emerges, and a swooping country-tinged guitar solo that Dick Dales itself to a theatrical end. As recoveries go, Balamir’s is remarkable.