♫♪  Western Edges - Prowess

Western Edges ghosts out over the expanse of town. In this case it’s Leeds, the city Richard Adams calls home. You may know Richard – he and his brother Chris founded Hood way back in 1991, and while the band went on hiatus in 2005, you’ll find the tendrils of its later period snaking through early iterations of IDM/post rock/ambient mashups. Yeah, Hood may have gone full Mark Hollis (RIP) or Bark Psychosis, or whatever, but once Richard was on his own, he dropped all pretensions of rock interest.

Well, not really, if his recordings as the Declining Winter have anything to say about it.

Shoehorned narrative aside, let’s fast-forward to 2019, where Richard has just dropped Prowess under the moniker Western Edges, a melancholic slurry of ambient mood pieces that drift into Boards of Canada territory at times. Reveling in the hazy nostalgia of nocturnal reverie, Adams scours his memory, the deep places, the alcoves where he keeps his most precious secrets, and ejects them into the atmosphere like fog over the evening. As such, Prowess doesn’t exactly follow the suggestion of its title, one of athletics and feats of strength. But it does incorporate the idea of bravery, in the sense that Adams is laying bare these very personal reflections, and it takes courage to send them out there, to all of us.

But then, he’s also used to it by now. He’s been doing it for [counts fingers, runs out of fingers] almost thirty years.

Prowess is delicate and lovely, and it’s an easy nighttime soundtrack to get lost in. Headphones definitely recommended. Handmade/hand-numbered CDRs on Sound in Silence.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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