It’s just another day when art reasserts itself. That’s what I tell myself anyway and Spirit Radio must be on the artistic side if the spectrum as their ethereal approach to music making is clearly devoid of any commercial intent with even this, sort of, remix of their previous work staying well clear of potential chart action. Welcome, therefore, to “Bill Seaman Reconstructs Spirit Radio”.
The thing that appeals most about Spirit Radio - Stephen Spera and Tamalyn Miller - is their determination to create an ambience rather than to be practitioners in the ambient genre. I can, for example, remember drifting off into some parallel reality whilst listening to their previous albums and finding myself in a world where light and dark haven’t quite the contrast level that our dayglo digital version has. A world where purity of expression is hidden behind the mists of musical condensation. A world where going nowhere seems like the best idea that you never had.
Bill Seaman’s reinvention of the Spirit Radio sound isn’t a million miles away from the original yet it is actually more conventional with a closer alignment with the ambient genre stylisations being evident and even Tamalyn Miller’s voice becoming a component of a whole rather than a spiritual direction sign to somewhere where the start is always closer to the end.
Whilst I am therefore not sure that I approve of the reinvention a musical work that already had enough form and substance to get to its artistic destination, “Bill Seaman Reconstructs Spirit Radio” at least remains true to the spirit of the original even if to reimagine what was already a flight of imagination seems more capricious than necessary.
Available from Bandcamp and the usual digital places.