WL//WH Review THE MELANCHOLY HOURS
The Melancholy Hours is the new music venture of the UK-based composer and sound artist Thomas Bagnoli, one half of the Shoegaze/Psychedelic duo Monochromatic Visions, who builds immersive and meditative, unfamiliar atmospheric soundscapes through
“a strikingly intimate collection of instrumental compositions that gently drift between ambient stillness and textural dissonance”.
Written and recorded in East London, and produced, mixed, and mastered by his partner in Monochromatic Visions, Arthur Pegis, the The Melancholy Hours‘ debut 4-track EP, “In Saudade”, via the Los Angeles-based sublabel of Spirit Goth Records, dedicated to lo-fi /indie ambient sounds, Memorycard, drawing inspiration from artists such as Windy and Carl, Slowdive, and Bowery Electric, unfolds like a study in emotional nuance, a sound world shaped by memory, absence, and unresolved feeling.
An amalgamation of ambient and shoegaze, veiled by an ecstatic and dreamy misty blanket, at times rippled by swathes of cold, pungent winds, to create an emotive and intimate headspace where dreams and reality blur.
“Layered textures, gentle melodies, and subtle sonic details evoke the bittersweet pull of late summer, the warmth of fading light, and the quiet ache of absence. Each piece drifts like a memory resurfacing, fragile, fleeting and quietly persistent”.
“Summer” opens with a reflective underwater feel where waves gently lap along the shore, slowly washed by wooshing, blurred harmonic frequencies, dotted by repetitive, lonesome and resonant tinkling drops, stirred by sparse, muffled hits, sizzling cymbals, and intervals of hazy, droning drifts and emotive glowing strings, to build an enveloping sense of longing and sadness.
Moods shift in “Azure”, the rhythmic patterns revolve into lashing and metallic whips, though still mechanical, and the instruments are heavily vibrant and full-bodied, anchored on sharp, sparkling guitar reverberations, drawing obscure mysteries and warm, poignant melodies against gleaming, chilly, transcendent synth skies, sinking toward a sloshing, boundless sea of shivering desolation.
A dense and echoing gloominess resonates in “Vestige”, through a haunting reiteration of a somber bass pulse, scattered by sparse weighty thudding beats and tense clinking echoes, layered with quivering reverb-drenched buzzy mists, along an emerging chilly vibrancy, that expands through the fog, before a shift occurs through an ephemeral stillness, that soon swirls in a surreal atmospheric outflow of ecstatic, dazzling shimmers, and rippling emotional, vivid strains that stir the soul with uplifting rays of hope.
“Calima” closes it all out with the looping bittersweet reverbs of a penetrating guitar arpeggio, shuffling through a sibilant and tinny low-slung pace, under cool, drifting celestial orbs and edgy lambent strains, ebbing and flowing to build anticipation and longing, before gently veering into the unpredictable, by unwinding exotic flavors of twangy plucked chords, laced with cold, blowing sensations, to envelope, soothe and harmonize the senses.
A heartwarming shipwreck into an ever changing touching sea of organic-synthetic sounds that enraptures and drags us along with a sinuous, mesmerizing, at times stretched and ridged flow, daring us to await the arrival of the next emotional wave from faraway memories.
The Melancholy Hours‘ debut 4-track EP, “In Saudade”, is out now on Limited Cassette & Digital via Memorycard.
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