Shelter of the Opaque

Comes with a 4-page booklet, artwork and layout by Lewis McLean. Vanishing’s stunning album Shelter Of The Opaque seizes quotidian reality and either scrapes away at the veneer to reveal the awful machinery of how things are underneath or overlays it with a gossamer filigree to suggest how they could be instead
Work started on building the skeleton of the album in 2018 with a session at the utopian cultural space, WORM in Rotterdam, featuring his trusty lieutenant, saxophonist Karl D’Silva (Drunk In Hell) and modular synth player Sam Weaver (Cuspeditions); while strings were added later by Abstract Concrete members Otto Willberg and Agathe Max plus Ecka Mordecai in Manchester. Smith guided the sessions via a series of simple imagistic commands, only adding his vocals after the music was done
The album is by turns more skeletal, more ambitious and more affecting than previous work, retaining some of Vanishing’s former berserk intensity and industrial grind, but as a single colour among many on a vivid new palette. Today the musical backing – which is as much informed by cold wave electronics, free jazz, Japanese ambient and discrete minimalism as it is by DIY noise – serves to aid Smith’s lyrics, not to obscure them, a seachange in process he puts down to “becoming more confident as a writer… more honest, more vulnerable. I was digging down deeper into personal subject matter that was rocking me about a bit more, searching for ideas with more emotional resonance.”