Accordionist/organist/composer Gordon H. Whitlow, a member of the avant-garde audiovisual collective Biota, has a distinguished résumé creating what I like to call adventurous music, music that opens previously unknown or unexplored territory. See It Alone, his latest album, introduced to me by Denver guitarist Janet Feder, leverages a group of collaborators he calls Sorry for Laughing. The album vividly occupies a fascinating musical space previously unknown to me.

Sorry for Laughing
See It Alone (Klang Galerie)
A review
Mesmerizing and emotionally charged, Gordon H. Whitlow’s See It Alone is composed with a little of everything—with influences that range from traditional folk to musique concrète, Gilbert and Sullivan to church hymns—and carries all the mystery and fluid coherence of a dream. The 12 tracks are realized by the project he calls Sorry For Laughing, which includes Whitlow (organs, accordion, strings, production), Edward Ka-Spel (of Legendary Pink Dots: vocals, atmospheres, lyrics), Martyn Bates (of Eyeless in Gaza: vocals, lyrics), Janet Feder (guitar, atmospheres), Patrick Q. Wright (violin), Kiyoharu Kuwayama (sound processing, cellos, candles, footsteps recording, power plant ruins), and Nigel Whitlow (trumpet). Their parts were contributed digitally from a distance and pulled together by Whitlow on what appears to be, judging from the photo on the Bandcamp site, a sound board as long as a banquet table—only appropriate, as the resulting music is an aural feast.

The opening track, “Seen by Candlelight,” sets the stage, with an extended and evolving hum that spits off sonic sparks along the way. The difficult-to-identify instrumentation sounds like a highly musical hyperdrive unit on an interstellar vessel. Highlights abound. “A Howl in the Park” features a melody that seems lifted from a children’s song and introduces the disquieting lyrics of Ka-Spel, whose warm, matter-of-fact delivery only deepens the sense of the macabre. Bates’s folkish “Fountain of Snow” carries an emotional wallop on his intimate and closely mic’ed vocal, with music that seems to come from a source that precedes thought. The minimalist and soothing instrumental hymn “Obsolesce” is counterbalanced by “Anti-Hymn,” with lyrics from Ka-Spel that offer a mordant take on religion. There’s the cordial violence of “The Necessity of Good Timing” and the delicate optimism of “Fate Star,” a song that breaks open like a ripe peach. The uneasy centerpiece, “Seven Stormy Oceans (an Edward Lear dream),” carries an Asian scent, with Ka-Spel and Bates collaborating on the lyrics, which feature verse lifted from Lear’s poem “The Jumblies.”

See It Alone is guaranteed to carry you adrift of the everyday and into a fascinating and phantasmic realm. The album art, which offers a compelling visual representation of the aural, was created by Whitlow’s fellow Biota member Tom Katsimpalis.

Listen/purchase a digital download here, or a CD here.

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© 2021 Mel Minter