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Heavy Calm animated music video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDSoox28iBQ&feature=youtu.be

Heavy Calm

When Those Lights Come For You

His Way Became Lost

Eve Of The Rains

Buy Album: https://seabuckthorn.bandcamp.com/album/i-could-see-the-smoke

‘I Could See The Smoke', an EP from UK guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Seabuckthorn. Since the recent success of guitarist Western Skies Motel’s album ’Settlers’ in April, the tribe has hit the jackpot this year signing another of the most interesting guitarists around. Andy Cartwright who records under the name Seabuckthorn came to our attention last year, after a wise suggestion from composer William Ryan Fritch with his full-length album, ’They Haunted Most Thickly’ on the admirable French label, Bookmaker Records. After taking a deep listen, the awe set in. Could this be the missing link between the bombastic, world building intensity of William Ryan Fritch and the sublime, droning meditations of Western Skies Motel? 

Seabuckthorn’s unique breed of guitar-based compositions have the ability to shift gear with such natural ease. Cartwright wields his weapons wisely, choosing a minimal, yet powerful arsenal made up of various twelve string guitars, a well worn resonator guitar, and deep accents of percussion. We hesitate to single out a particular style in the case of Seabuckthorn, as it rests comfortably alongside many genres. Americana and British folk are easy tags. The music also borrows from modern classical and drone. At times, even subtle cues of the Middle East enter the picture. Yet something more ancient is at work here, that recalls the minstrels of old, or the seafaring hymns of a long forgotten civilization. At times, the music comes full force, like an intense hunt through darkened woods, unleashing the resonator like half-tamed hounds, wild and relentless, a sickly horn-like sound rises from haze, a claustrophobic dread setting in the mind of the prey. In other moments, Cartwright's music plays with subdued, visceral tones that immediately fill the mind with imagined, yet familiar scenes: the hushed ember-lit nocturne for a desert at dusk; or the weary basecamp reveries at the summit of impassible cloud-capped mountains. 

Cartwright notes in his own words that, "'I Could See The Smoke' is an arrangement of ideas gathered whilst on a European tour throughout June 2016, along with a couple of older songs I've been playing live for a year or so. After the tour, I returned home to Bristol eager to strike while the iron was hot and try to capture these compositions. Recorded & mixed over a period of two weeks whilst feeling the heat (both literally & politically) I opted for a threatening, even apocalyptic EP title. Saying that, I think most of these songs can offer up a tranquillity to counteract the gravity of these uncertain times, a calm inside the eye of a storm."

Mastered by William Ryan Fritch

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