Who is Dave Harrington: A session musician and producer that is best known for his work as one half of Darkside.
Who is the Group: A bunch of musician-pals assembled for a three-day recording foray.
Why is it our album of the week: It fuses free-improv jazz with free-thinking electronics.
Become Alive is the result of a three day recording session orchestrated by Dave Harrington. He called on some of his favourite musician pals, “unpacking his musical training” through these individuals, who all accentuated different parts of Dave Harrington’s own musical development. The three-day free-improved recording sessions, were then re-visited and alongside co-producer Samer Ghadry, Harrington set out to create fully formed compositions from these rough musical sketches.
The result is music that is incandescent, unpredictable and bounding with life. Through re-approaching the recordings from a production perspective, Harrington manages to find concise forms where wayward and free-extemporisation lived before. He applies some of that free-thinking Darkside approach to these recordings and finds new textures for acoustic instruments through electronic processes, that swathes everything in a kind of hazy atmosphere, pulling these various elements together in a singular voice that’s an immersive listening experience. Not much of the free-improv remains on the surface of the tracks, making the music far more accessible and approachable for an immersive listening experience. We make Become Alive our album of the week, since we’ve admired it since its release and on the week of The Dave Harrington group coming to our basement, we intend to listen to it quite a bit.