Dau - Zed Zed (2021)

UK ambient musician Dau debuts on Phantom Limb’s Spirituals imprint with lush, organic mini-album Zed Zed, created entirely from acoustic instrumentation and real-time performances.

A brand new project from UK musician Phil Self, Dau coalesces years of wide musical experiences. Self is a member of numerous projects, including acclaimed UK instrumental sextet yndi halda and the live band of folk-rock singer-songwriter Will Varley. He additionally runs the wonderful Isolation Choir non-profit initiative for the elderly and vulnerable, in which musicians and non-musicians alike are invited to contribute remotely to pieced-together ensemble performances. Brian Eno was so moved by the first video he offered his services for the second.

Combined with lockdown isolation, this raft of musical knowledge led Self to the serenely crafted quietude of Dau and his debut solo release Zed Zed. The record is intimate and personal, constructed with immense care and delicateness. Opener “Hangman’s Cricket” (the first of two tracks inspired by and named after the films of Peter Greenaway) ripples and breathes with life, every creak of its bowed guitar audible as the seagulls flying above Self’s flat. Later, “The Death of Smut” yearns with the elegiac grace of film score, its gentle chords swelling with profound longing as Self gradually nurtures the track into breathtaking eloquence. Throughout the record are pastoral textures of slowmotion prettiness softly expanding and contracting about unusual, home-made sonics and deep, lulling drones. Stirring convergences of melodic threads that weave about expansive open plains of resonant harmonies; stillness and peace underpinning vanishing moments of the everyday, captured by field recordings or coincidental background noise to the recording.