Before his legendary work on Talk Talk's two enduring masterpieces, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, as well as Mark Hollis' eponymous solo album, Phill Brown had enjoyed a long and storied career as a studio engineer and producer, working with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, Bob Marley, and Roxy Music, to name but a few. While Brown's background suggested a fine rock-music pedigree, the nature of his work with Hollis was quite different. By the time of their first collaboration on Spirit of Eden, Talk Talk had relinquished any interest in traditional song structure, and Hollis' focus in particular had evolved from complex yet conventional sound layering methods to attempting a free association technique, which he described as "sound collage," where organically recorded sound fragments are woven, during the editing process, into a sonic whole-cloth. This approach would eventually inform Paul Webb and Lee Harris' .O.Rang project as well as Phill Brown's post-Talk Talk collaboration with visual artist Dave Allinson on a brilliant piece of ambient minimalism called A V I. Half of this album's four tracks are devoted to a two-part composition bearing the album's title that was originally conceived as an accompaniment to a video installation . "A V I- Pt. I" is a nearly twenty-minute sound scape, which bears no trace of song structure or any recognizable pop elements and manages to capture much of the same ambiance that made Brown's work with Talk Talk so distinctive. Combining eerie atmospherics with a diversity of organic ambient sounds, the piece is a stunningly elegant journey into the beauty of sounds untethered to formal structure yet somehow still suggesting movement through a composed space. Quite jarringly at first, "A V I- Pt. II" is built around a sumptuously bass-driven rhythmic pattern that, while offering a more structured feel than Pt. I, is just as evocative of the beauty inherent in individual sounds themselves. Another memorable contribution is "Piano" written and performed by Mark Hollis (credited here as John Cope). The best way to describe this lovely, elegiac composition for solo piano is to quote the man himself: "Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note- and don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." While many discuss A V I in terms of the fine line it walks between musicality and fragmented atonality, part of what makes the album so singular and worth revisiting regularly is the way it does manage to be consistently engaging in a musical sense. Fragile, a tad ephemeral, but never less than profound, A V I is an obscure gem to be sure.
