Album Review: Jamie Trevaskis + James Lees – Ghostlight

Experimental yet soothingly accessible, Ghostlight is a stunning collaboration between Jamie Trevaskis and James Lees.

Though the two “Australian mountain-dwellers” and musicians have been friends for many years, this is their official collaborative debut, and one that will be hard to beat. Just when you think you’ve got the measure of it, it takes you down another sonic byway before re-joining the main themes of the album.

Ghostlight can trace its existence back to a series of extended solo guitar instrumentals recorded by Trevaskis. Lees had worked with him as part of two of his other musical projects, Ghostwoods and Silver Sircus, which might go to explain how the two fit so well together here.

Lees brings virtuoso-like piano and percussion performances to the album’s eight pieces, as they are the centre of ebbing and flowing soundscapes. The opening duo of tracks, Ghostlight and Mettle, are cinematic, but not in the sense of blockbusters or even art house movies. Rather than being an accompaniment for images, they become the images themselves: dark skies, roiling oceans, and rolls of distant thunder that seem to be coming ever closer.

Yearning is a highly emotional affair. Though underpinned by haunting echoes of an electronic drone that builds to a sudden and crashing crescendo, its name is an apt description. The following piece, Sway, is like a continuation; the shading and balance of Yearning have shifted, as if an unknown fear is coming closer, one that is not entirely unwelcome.

I wouldn’t want to pinpoint the forebears of the album, though anything that makes me think of Dead Can Dance and Brian Eno can’t be faulted. On Echo Chamber, you hear the first vocal contribution, and you suddenly realise that the album is looking at time and place: whether they are still or constantly moving, as the duo immortalise seconds as soundscapes.

In Sleepwalking, I hear placid oceans and parched deserts – vast expanses that need to be endured so we succeed – and arrive elsewhere. There is a lot more happening within it that initial impressions may tell you, but that is the nature of human stories told on a wide canvas.

The album rounds off with Afterimage and The Third Sunday: again, that sense of the immensity of time, place, and nature is present, glacial in Afterimage, but sometimes bubbling like a fresh spring as it concludes. The Third Sunday is probably the most conventional piece on the album, but it is told on such a scale as to remind you of your own insignificance.

Trevaskis and Lees are not just obviously talented musicians; Ghostlight reveals that they can tell stories without words and create images without pastels or paint. And that is a rare, valuable thing indeed.

Ghostlight was released on the 24th of September via 4000Records – you can pick it up in digital and CD formats on Bandcamp. Head to the Instagram accounts of Jamie Trevaskis and James Lees for details of an official album launch at The Junk Bar as part of slow music club 06 on Sunday the 11th of October.