Al Wootton - Lifted From The Earth (2024)

oomkat Product Review:
Guess-again shapeshifter Al Wootton continues a fertile streak of releases for ZamZam, Livity and his own Trule label, as well as an acclaimed collab with Susumu Mukai and Valentina Magaletti as Holy Tongue, on a killer new album for Berceuse Heroique’s tape series, a screwed navigation of mood pieces and hypnotic club inversions primed for the low lights.

Joining the ranks of Carrier, Vladimir Ivkovic, Pessimist and others before him in the series, Wootton chases elusive moods with a feel for salient aspects of early techno, dub house, and 4th world ambient, in a loose type of jazz-fusion framework. He essentially provides a new album’s worth of original material, taking the tape’s longform canvas as license to fray and bind the various strands that have come to define his work since 2019 under his own name, after more than a decade dancing between the styles and patterns of UKF/UKG, and more recently diversifying his bonds in freer music via Holy Tongue – and it’s been highly satisfying to follow his nose where it goes.

Faithful to the format, Wootton plots out ‘Lifted From The Earth’ with a narrative suss opening on the sublime dread of ‘Peace of Passau’, before the rhythms slosh from sinuous 4th world tribalism and Luomo-esque minimal dub house bliss (‘A Novena to the Purisma’), to meter-messing Kassem Mosse style steppers’ (‘Grain and New Wine’). He turns a page into the ambient sublime on ‘First Words After Sunrise’, making beautiful use of a choral leitmotif that threads thru the album on ‘An Owl of the Desert’, reserving his craftiest shuffle for ‘The Cedars of Lebanon’ and the furtive hush of ‘Their Towers are Desolate’, somehow recalling László Hortobágyi and co’s ECM classic ‘Kurtágonals’.

Lovers of the blue mood and the simmering slide of House music, anything from the Workshop label to NWAQ, will wanna get deep into this one.