Album Review: Other Islands: 2012-2018

Fiff Dimension is an umbrella label for audio visual projects by David Edwards (AKA Dave Black), solo or with various collaborators.

Other Islands is a collection of work spanning 2012 to 2018, recorded by Edwards and a wide plethora of collaborators, in a myriad of styles.

The 20 song album covers from the traditional Javanese and Balinese gamelan, Asian folk music, free jazz, and free noise.

It’s not for anyone with narrow preconceived ideas about what music is, but it is for everyone else. If you have an open inquiring mind and love hearing a variety of sound, this is excellent.

The opening track The Winter – Flying Visit very much sets the tone with a veritable orchestra of instruments rising and falling in an ordered chaos for 2 minutes and 42 seconds.

The following tune is a collaboration between Dave Black and Nat da Hatt and is called Asadoya Yunta Overdrive (Okinawa) and features classical Japanese instruments and found sounds.

Borobudur ke Prambanan (Java), and Gamelan Taniwha Jaya – Gopala (Bali) are two excellent recording of Indonesian music, really adding to the wide ranging array of musical styles on offer.

Other Islands: 2012-2018 is an epic southern Asiatic exploration of sound, notable in the recordings of traditional music blended at times with radios and televisions in the background.

The second to last piece, A Ton of Feathers, features Campbell Kneale, and is a as traditional a noise canvas as you’re likely to get. Highly fuzzed out feeding back guitars layered with an amalgam of other sounds

Well worth repeated listens for the musically adventurous. Great work Dave Edwards.

Other Islands: 2012 – 2018 is available on Bandcamp.