Bleeding Heart Narrative & Gosia Winter – Wire and String

The internet is a wonderful thing isn’t it? The whole world connected via a bunch of wires and a few electronic signals. There’s a wealth of information at your fingertips should you want to know anything about anything. Of course there are downsides too, such as social networking sites that allow people you’d never want to stay in touch with to track you down and harass you. Similarly, for all the time most of us waste stalking people, there are others who are using their time resourcefully and actually getting serious mileage out of this connectivity.Fully embracing technology, Bleeding Heat Narrative and Gosia Winter have been exchanging files back and forth between Australia and London, slowly building up sounds and songs until they’ve finally come up with something just a little bit special.It’s something of a change in sound for Bleeding Heart Narrative, whose debut album All That Was Missing We Never Had in the World was filled with lush instrumentation that tripped across the line between the electronic and classical music like a balletic robotic Mozart. Wire and String is a far more reductive affair, with arrangements stripped to the bone. That’s not to say they’re ineffective, far from it, but the switch to a more minimal sound for the entirety of this EP is something of a shock.Perhaps the reason for the sparse nature of the instrumental side of these songs is down to the vocals of Gosia Winter. Rather than letting the music do all the talking, the focus is now on Winter for the whole of this EP. This is most evident on the achingly beautiful 'Right Moon', in which Winter runs with a fragile main vocal and compliments herself with a clever percussive backing vocal sample. That the piano that accompanies her rarely ventures away from a basic motif is neither here nor there, because you’re completely enveloped with Winter’s perfectly understated vocals. And what vocals they are. Distant and familiar at the same time, she’s the sound of the wind drifting across harp strings, the wisps of a fleeting memory and on 'Firefly', she’s the childish hoots that echo from a thousand nurseries at story time. There’s something distinctly Bjorkian in her delivery in that she’s very playful with her vocals, happy to mess with sounds and ideas rather than simply sticking to the basics of verse and chorus. Despite the presence of the clearly gifted Bleeding Heart Narrative, you’d have to say that this is very much Gosia Winter’s record.And yet, dig below the vocals and you’ll find some truly interesting arrangements and instrumentation. It may be skeletal at times, but it serves its purpose perfectly. There may not be as much to assault the senses as we’d like, but the barren soundscapes pull you in looking for something to grasp on to. As the album closes with 'Fixed Stars', you feel like you’re lost in Narnia, down to your last lump of Turkish delight, and not really caring, because somehow this cold desolate landscape feels like home.Wire and String is an almost supernatural record that takes those most authentic of instruments (harp, cello, piano, and of course voice) dismantles them into bits of code and reassembles them in a way that can only be described as ethereal. Don’t you just love technology? It makes the divine possible. 72%Bleeding Heart Narrative on Myspace