Jonathan Coleclough Period CD Anomalous Available through the Helen Scarsdale Agency: $14.00 'The motion of light on water' is how Jonathan Coleclough prefers to explain his music, acquiring the poetic whisper of careful deliberation that is characteristic of Bernhard Gunter's written words. The British drone explorer seeks out the tiny imperfections and unique variations within a long continuous sound which enable his compositions to capture the interest of an audience throughout an extended duration. Few artists have had the ability to pull off such an unassumingly difficult task, but Coleclough has had the good fortune to work with several of them, notably the hermetic Andrew Chalk (who has turned his talents to the Mirror productions with Christoph Heemann) and the versatile Colin Potter (who has often leant his sympathetic engineering ear to Nurse With Wound). Within Coleclough's most recent set of recordings Period and Low Ground, both Chalk and Potter do haunt these beautiful recordings, though Chalk's presence is far more ephemeral than Potter's hands-on collaborative and engineering work. This is the extended CD version of Coleclough's Period LP, also published by Anomalous. For these recordings, Coleclough's source material is entirely the piano, whose clustered notes he massages into variable, evanescent washes of sound. These pointillist marks smeared through digital effects do recall previous successes at piano driven ambient music – in particular Eno's Thursday Afternoon and even some of the piano impressionism sprinkled throughout the Cindytalk albums – but Coleclough's sensibility and pacing is even slower and more sparse. His use of the piano in conjunction with his assortment of blurring techniques activates a subtle, but distinctly present tension between harmonious purity and unnerving dissonance.