Bearer – Praxis 2LP

Two slabs of bedsit concrète from label cohort Bearer, whose blurry dub-damaged soundscapes debuted on that Precincts CD (one of our favourites of 2020) are washed away and replaced with sprawling, intimate suite of home-cooked crud.  As always with this unassuming label, they’re really onto something.  Bearer’s domestic shamanism feels on par with any of the Lambkin / Lescalleet collaborations – digging in the sonic rubble and assembling the detritus into a sound picture that has its own weight of gravity.  The depth of field is off, like listening to the outside world whilst stuck inside a fridge, sounds smothered and rendered vague whilst flickers of humanity rise to the surface on the lonesome guitar standout ‘Dance And Drama’, sorta recalling the moods Thomas Bush conjures at his most solitary and exposed moments.  Undeniably a 2LP of this stuff demands the right time and place, but the duration and sheer scale of this statement from Bearer is the main attraction – how often can a record properly swallow you up?