Snow Blind, a double album that came out on Install earlier this year, was my first experience of Peter Wright. That huge slab of voidal wintry drones led me into the tangled thicket of his back catalogue, which is both alluring and repulsive: alluring in its clarity of vision and ambition, repulsive in its sheer size and complexity ”“ there are corridors of this stuff, with more in the archives. These drone mavens are nothing if not prolific and insistent”¦ An Angel Fell Where The Kestrel Hover is something of a piece with Snow Blind ”“ a brighter, more optimistic gloss if you like, spring instead of winter. Where Snow Blind flailed and loomed with a kind of brumal intensity, this soothes and has more of an air of passivity.

The titles of the five pieces on An Angel Fell are probably enough to signal what Wright’s obsessions are with this record: ‘Fell Asleep Here’, ‘London is Drowning’, ‘Lavender Buzz,’ ‘River Lea Time Lapse’ ”“ this is a record concerned with place and environment, and the effects they have upon us. It also seems to be about contemplation and stillness as the guitar figures and drones contained within the five tracks are radiant and relatively still, emitted from a single source. This fits into one of Wright’s wider aesthetic values, that of drift and dream induction. He’s said in the past that he is ‘often just lost in space with my thoughts so I suppose I'm trying to map that out in sound as best I can’ ”“ with this in mind An Angel Fell”¦is a soporific album.

‘Fell Asleep Here’ is as simple a track as I’ve heard from Wright ”“ a faint but high pitched oscillator gives way to a series of acoustic chords that almost bury a signature whining drone. This gives way to what one assumes is a thematically linked track, ‘Sunstroke’. This is all whooze and wash ”“ a drone overlain with a guitar treated to sound close to a sitar in sound. Within the boundaries of these emanations is faint birdsong ”“ the piped silver of robins and the near major C melody of blackbirds - and it’s these natural sounds that carry through into ‘Lavender Buzz’ which reverses the tonic levels of the former track and amplifies the birdsong and bee buzz and buries the instrumentation.

Something occurs to me listening to these re-creations of London that Wright, a native Kiwi who lived in London for six years, returning to his hometown of Christchurch only relatively recently, has managed to construct a kind of London pastoral with An Angel Hovered”¦These sweet drones are at times like miniature bucolic symphonies, leaks from London’s green zones. The River Lea, which forms the centre of the next track, is one such zone ”“ from a lock-side to the lush gardens that back on to Hackney Marshes, there is a sense that you could be anywhere in England. Or perhaps that you could be anywhere in the cathedral of Wright’s mind.

The twinned ‘London is Drowning”¦And I Live By the River’ forms the lush metallic centrepiece of the album, and despite the portentous title has a warmth about it. Part of me wonders if this is a recreation of the resigned calmness you sometimes hear associated with drowning. It certainly feels self-contained and peaceful. With this in mind, the closing track ”“ ‘Kestrels’ - is like waiting, waiting for that angel of the album’s title to descend”¦

All of which is to say that Wright’s impressionistic fabrications do certainly induce a kind of dreamwork ”“ in the grip of these tracks the mind drifts and speculates, at times floating completely free of any associative games at all. Not escapist as such, more a kind of abandonment. To me, weighed down by the incessant noise of information, and all this cultural clutter and debris I choose to surround myself with, that’s some achievement.

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