Michael Begg - Lulu and the Blacks

Michael Begg has been on a remarkable creative run, moving between commissions, residencies, and data-driven environmental works that culminated recently in WITNESS. Ambient Chamber Works 2020-24. This new release arrives with little in the way of explanation from the former Human Greed member, who has worked with a wide array of artists including Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Chris Connelly, Colin Potter as well as being part of Clodagh Simonds's Fovea Hex. On Lulu and the Blacks he presents something more private: a collection of music that feels intimate and introspective, lit by memory and beauty delivered with a disarming tenderness.

The album opens with the swelling orchestral grace of 'Ascent', leading into 'The Bones in Currie Kirkyard (are soft and wet and yours)', a slow, drifting suspension of synth tones so light they seem to hover, damp with soil and memory of a churchyard close to Begg's base in East Lothian.

The voices of a choir are used so evocatively on 'A Crisis in Archetype Psychiatry' where with the slightest of processing they merge seamlessly into the ambience. Chiming bells, unruly tapping and uneasy string dissonance lends the music a cinematic tension. The effect is unsettling yet full of wonder - mysterious, haunting and just gorgeous.

On 'Fill the Air' strings slowly unfurl into aching, airborne melancholic ambience before dissolving into a processed atmospheric passage of choral vapour amid rainfall and birdsong. It's a moment where the natural and the numinous intermingle. The tenderness deepens in the doleful 'An Intimation' and continues in 'Let It Go', both carried by solemn piano scores, and the latter bathed in a beguilingly fragile atmospheric ambience.

The title track, 'Lulu and the Blacks', offers a shift in atmosphere: hollow percussive chimes echo into ominous spacious ambience, where fragments of song and radio-static transmissions flicker like lost signals across time. The sense of searching continues into 'Photoplay', where interference and classical textures collide, before slipping into a collage of choral song, fire crackle and birdsong and back again. The whole thing feels like trying to tune into a radio broadcast and receiving ghosts from the past instead.

Begg is at his most direct on the melancholic 'Sad Tears', a piece derived from John Dowland (a key touchstone on the works of Human Greed) with synthetic weeping synths and strings moving in aching, deliberate arcs. Such is Begg's capacity as a composer the emotional pull is quietly devastating.

'Too Late for Dogs' closes the album in slow-expanding layers of chimes, keys and synths. In some ways it recalls aspects of WITNESS. Ambient Chamber Works 2020-24 partly due to its structure resembling the slow drift of ambient music combined with generated data points and movement through ice shelves.

Michael Begg has been doing this for years, and even without explicit explanation or a defined concept, the quality of his music speaks for itself. Lulu and the Blacks is another remarkable work - intimate, assured, and quietly luminous - and makes an ideal companion for late-evening, moonlit walks. Lulu and the Blacks is available digitally and as a limited CD from Omnempathy bandcamp