Mark Fell & Rian Treanor: Last Exit to Chickenley (Boomkat Editions)

Hands (and now, masks) down for the greatest pandemic recording to date! And a very big shoutout to the Fell and Treanor family pod!! 

 Originally released in an alternate and abbreviated form as a cassette through Boomkat's Documenting Sound series in 2021, that recording was later edited for a new, expanded and altered edition, mastered by Rashad Becker. 

 And now we’ve arrived at our era’s Last Exit (enough w/ Selby already, folks … we are living through an actual plague).

These inter-generational recordings emerged out of long days in the family garden when time felt pandemic-suspended.  The recordings were then reassembled into this diaristic and mesmerizing project. 

Spare rhythms and lots of atmosphere dominate these four sides, building a hyperawareness of foreground and background. Musical and non-musical elements provide a similarly interesting interplay.  If you know Fell’s fragmentary dance work already, Treanor brings musicality and texture to these pieces, aural themes adding depth and feeling.  The duo recording Treanor released in 2023 with Ocen James via Nyege is case in fantastic point.

Here is how Boomkat frames this double record: “The 80 minutes […] feel like returning to a dream, with flashes of FM strings dabbed to sloshing rhythms and domestic detritus, tilting into a nervously tentative tension ruptured with abstract dance dynamism and angular free jazz ballistics. A longform isolationist fantasy.” 

Team 2023 echoes: “angular free jazz ballistics,” indeed!!