Review: Tom Moore & Archie Moss, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘A sweeping, star-gazing soundtrack’

Tom Moore and Archie Moss are artists. They’re magicians. They’re conjurers. They might hold a viola (Moore) and an accordion (Moss) but they could just as easily use paints, film or the supernatural to create their world.

This is folk music by way of black & white European cinema, by way of haunting, fragmented sketching.

Do you know that feeling just before a storm breaks? The prelude, the lull, the moment when the atmosphere changes, when the world holds its breath. That moment when you know something is about to happen but you’re not sure when. #

The whole of this extraordinary set from these two incredible musicians feels like that.

Giga is, almost certainly, a jig but it’s a jig that never allows you to dance. It builds and breaks and slows and builds again but it never permits you to relax into the tune.

This gives it incredible power even as it constantly wrong foots you. It’s dance music that’s impossible to dance to.

Windmill Hill has an experimental sparse-ness and segues into Nina’s Song. It’s almost unbearably tense as disjointed movements pile up next to one another, each one more ghostly than the last, each one threatening to spill out into something smooth and reassuring. It almost never does though. Instead, it feels as though a noir-ish Scandinavian dream is slipping through your fingers.

Moore’s viola is echoed and looped – at times you’d swear that there are two, three or four of his instrument on stage – and on Universeum he helps a sweeping, star-gazing soundtrack unfold.

The closest comparison is probably Lau and all of their odd, gauzy cine-scapes and, like Lau, these are tunes that, ideally, could use some films to help them coalesce.

Moss adds a droning base with his accordion, setting up a meniscus that the tunes skip across, like a dragonfly or a hummingbird.  The viola hovers over things, threatening to break the surface but instead, landing, pausing and flying off again.

On Omens, from the latest album Spectres, it’s almost a relief when the thin base layer is, eventually, broken and the stompbox drives a tune but, even then, the threatened deluge fails to materialise. Safety is so close but never arrives.

Pigeon City/Trapdoors brings the evening to a close. It started life as a field recording on the late-night streets of Bristol but is now a disquieting, complex, hypnotic meditation on isolation, urban nature and darkness.

It is startling, intricate and devastatingly beautiful. This is music for the head, not for the feet.

And then, after all of the experimentation, all of the pretty snatches, all of the tantalising moments, Moore and Moss play a simple, beautiful, acoustic Folk song – no electronics, no tension.

The 7th of October almost says “yeah, so, we could do this stuff all day, do it better than anyone else, but we can do that other stuff too”.

The “other stuff” might be more difficult, might be disconcerting, might be uncomfortable but it’s deeply rewarding.

Main photo: Barry Savell

Read next:

• Review: SUEP, The Crofters Rights – ‘Eclectic arrangement of songs tied together by playful synth melodies’
• Review: Let Spin, Strange Brew – ‘They are a group of contrasts and striking dynamics’
• Review: Easy Life, Trinity – ‘Their energy was completely infectious’

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