Josh Semans - To Will A Space Into Being

A Closer Listen

For all the similarities, there’s a striking contrast between To Will A Space Into Being, Josh Semans’ somophore album, and his debut, …And The Birds Will Sing At Sunrise.

Both albums are achingly beautiful, both centre around Josh’s chosen instrument, the ondes Martenot, and both feature striking greyscale cover art, but thematically, they have a fundamental difference.

…And The Birds explores the loss of the natural world in the Anthropocene with penetrating intensity, while the “space” in To Will A Space seems to be an entirely human space. Nature is not present here; just architecture. Yet To Will A Space is no less beautiful. If the debut is an elegy to a near-extinct environment, the sequel seems to posit that humans can create beauty just as well as we can destroy it.

The album draws inspiration from the Brutalist architecture common to many post-war cities in the UK and posits that material has intrinsic beauty. We can enjoy the hiss and warble of the tape machines, just as we can appreciate the texture of the concrete in the Barbican, one of Brutalism’s most famous monuments.

In …And The Birds, Josh’s ondes Martenot is joined by piano and electronics, but here it shares the stage with the Juno 6 and a string quartet. The piano’s absence is striking: as an acoustic instrument which produces notes than cannot be sustained permanently, its use in …And The Birds was apposite. In To Will A Space, the instruments can all sustain themselves indefinitely. There is something hopeful about this. For all of …And The Birds‘s beauty, it had moments of desperate bleakness: it’s not for nothing that one of the tracks is called “Omnicide”.

Listening to To Will A Space Into Being is akin to walking around a vast abandoned city, full of beautiful spaces, empty of its people. At times we pass through narrow halls; at others we find ourselves entering vast, airy vaulted rooms. The title track, which opens the album, contrasts percussive electronic pitches with the lengthy spaces projected by the ondes Martenot and, later, the strings. As the contrapuntal complexity gradually increases, the sense of space expands, until we have a cathedral of sound, not dissimilar in concept to Claude Debussy’s “Cathedrale Engloutie”. By contrast the subsequent track “First Traces of Infrastructure” has a much more constrained space: the percussive electronics of the first track are recast, echoing as if walking down a concrete corridor. The ondes Martenot is ever-present. At times it wails like a ghost; at times it whistles like the wind through an alley; at times it even sounds close to song, as if an android had somehow learnt to vocalise and was singing its heart out. But where have all the humans gone? If the architecture portrayed here is as empty of life as this reviewer thinks, what have we done to ourselves? Have we willed ourselves out of being?

Regardless, this album is a love song to beauty. In its own gorgeousness it excels at the very thing it pays tribute to. Highly recommended. (Garreth Brooke)