7/10 Will 01 October 2019

Portico Quartet's fifth album 'Memory Streams' is a hushed and ethereal exploration of a sweet spot between ambient music and experimental jazz.

I really like the general fidelity of this record. You can hear the odd blast of recording hiss and it feels very immediate. My favourite piece is 'Ways of Seeing' which has frenetic drum rhythms ticking away in the background as well as small, sparse, distant loops that coagulate into a beautiful maelstrom of sound. 'With, Beside, Against' is a superb opener. It's a song of two halves, with the first half building to a climax before falling away into waves of gradually thinning ambience.

If this record was less acoustic sounding then I think the nebulous quality of 'Memory Streams' would be lost. When listening to this record, you can almost drift between instruments and just listen to combinations such as hang and piano, percussion and synth, piano and white noise. It's a really interesting and dynamic way of arranging a record.

'Memory Streams' is a record that feels like a sound collage. Melody lines, sax honks, drum fills, ambient washes seem like they've been plucked from unfinished projects and been thrown together into something enjoyably slapdash (NOT A CRITICISM, REPEAT, NOT A CRITICISM).