Bleep

Rupert Clervaux’s After Masterpieces is an album of firsts - this is both the debut solo LP from Clervaux and the first artist full-length to be released through Whities. Not only is it a milestone in the arc of both artist and label, but such is the inventiveness of After Masterpieces that it may also come to be seen as an important moment in the story of experimental art.

Across six tracks, the longest of which clocks in at well over twenty minutes, we find Clervaux reciting his poetry over dense art music. The musical makeup of After Masterpieces is immensely varied - electroacoustic composition, arid digital drones, free jazz, woozy post-Romantic piano loops and twisted approximations of choral music are just some of the styles that float to the surface. Tracks like ‘Prelude - Her Fingers Of Pink Light’ and ‘Hidden In The Frail Partition’ are weightless and eerie in a manner that nods to Oval and Mica Levi & Oliver Coates’ collaborative LP Remain Calm, while ‘In Shadowlands Of Like And Likeness’ and ‘Make Nature Speak’ are urgently rhythmic.

When Clervaux’s verse enters the fray it is often portentous in a manner that recalls the prophesying of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ or W. B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’. The way his utterances rise up out of the soundscape is reminiscent of Tarquin Manek & Martina Quake’s Locks On Our Doors Not On Our Hearts. Further vocal interjections from Sian Ahern and Anna Homler (Breadwoman) emerge to guide us through After Masterpieces - the singing that rounds out the record is a beautifully beatific moment.

With the After Masterpieces LP both Rupert Clervaux and Whities take a bold step forward.