NOVEMBER

November is the seventh solo album by Danish composer and multi-instrumentalist Robin Taylor, and if anyone want to know why he's regarded as experimental and even avant-garde they should get a fair few clues on this production.

The massive 20+ minutes long "The Dark Side of Life" iss the dominating feature in terms of length, a neat wandering melody quickly changing into a multilayered droning experience building up a richly textured wall of sound, and then after 5 minutes or so it slowly dissolves as layers are removed one by one while som dominating droning patterns replace others along the way, ending up with a sparse fragmented affair gradually building up towards a wall of sound again in the last few minutes.

The total opposite is found on "Lowest", an extremely minimalistic arhythmic exploration with fragmented piano and guitar sounds occasionally enriching the offbeat, slow percussion at hand here.

Thge high point of this production, at least for me, are the tracks "Wating For Something To Happen" and the following excursion "The Big Sleep" - the former containing a broken off piano-dominated theme repeated over and over again over a backdrop of a single droning keyboard-layer featuring a 2 minute pause with fragmented piano noises over the drone; while the latter opens with fragmented noises evolving into a droning venture gradually evolving into a richly textured fluctuating melodic landscape with - you guessed it - droning qualities.

All in all I find this album to be a mixed affair; and although many of the tracks are compelling and intriguing others just tends to get too offbeat for my personal tastes. It's also a pretty bleak effort, inspired by the month of November apparently, which in Taylor's Denmark as well as my own native Norway is a gray and bleak time of the year.

This is also a pretty taxing affair to get familiar with; it does take some experience listening to advanced musical explorations to decode what's going on here - unless you have an inborn talent for enjoying such creation in the first place of course.