Bex Burch - There is only love and fear

A Closer Listen

International Anthem is the perfect label for this album as it reflects the nature of its genesis.  Bex Burch lived in Ghana for three years, gaining the skills that eventually enabled her to build her own wooden xylophone.  She’d also lived in London and collaborated with various musicians there before moving again to Berlin and making an eight-hour drive to Utrecht.  The album itself is packed with Chicago collaborators, most recognizably Tortoise drummer Dan Bitney.

What could have been a hodgepodge instead sounds remarkably fluid and dynamic.  There is only love and fear lands decidedly on the side of love, although it could have been otherwise.  The album begins with the sound of footsteps, which convey the theme of motion.  “Dawn Blessings” integrates the sound of birds, recorded on one continent, folded into music on another.  Burch begins to play, and a wide array of friends joins in.  The album sounds like a joyous experiment, its spontaneity hiding the many hours of editing.

Guided by the question, “What sounds do I like today?”, Burch invited friends to do the same: to bring “the sounds they liked” into the studio.  Working without preconceptions, these artists seem as free and inspired as the birds that surround them.  The only exception: the sirens and tornado warning (Chicago is, after all, the Windy City) that run through the first half of “You thought you were free.”  Did the performers really keep clapping and stomping as danger swirled about them?  There’s likely no sound as carefree as an oompah, which sounds like the sun after the storm.

By the same standard, the listener might focus on the sounds they like and the titles they like.  It’s hard not to fall for a title like “Fruit smoothie with peanut butter,” the track only 84 seconds long, the smile lasting longer.  The percussion of “Pardieu” (roughly translated, “Well, I’ll be!”) is catchy and invitational, while the xylophone in the rain of “Start before you’re ready” provides the most evocative moments.  When wood pigeons respond, one imagines their cooing as an interspecies duet.  The album grows even more encouraging as it progresses, with the carousel-like “Joy is not meant to be a crumb” and the laughter-inflected “Follow me I make you happy” leading to the set finale “When love begins.”  As the waves crash on the coast of Rügen Island, one thinks, “there’s no place like home,” but then adjusts the statement to “and any place can be home, when one is with the right people and in the right frame of mind.”  If these conditions are met, there is only love.  (Richard Allen)

The Guardian 0

(International Anthem)
The percussionist shares characteristics with Steve Reich or John Adams, but intersects this with sounds from Mali, Bali and Latin America in a freakish fusion of jazz, techno and funk