Michael Cutting - Luft (2019)

LUFT is the second solo release of Salford-based tape musician Michael Cutting. Continuing his experiments with reel-to-reel recorders, LUFT revels in the imperfections of degrading tape, faltering machines and roughly spliced loops to conjure an intimate yet visceral sonic landscape peppered with tape flutter, crackles and unsteady self-replications. At the centre is the dusty wheezing of a 19th Century organ, with the clicking of its rusty bellows providing much of the music’s rhythmic impetus while its piercing reeds underpin a gently microtonal harmonic language. Complemented at different times by an e-bowed violin, fender rhodes, clarinet, trumpet, sine tone generator and voice, the album’s seven tracks evoke a quiet, imagined journey, a journey both personal and geographical.