Peter Wright

Following on from 2004's Yellow Horizon, At Last A New Dawn comes as a momentous deployment of Peter Wright's adventurous, emotionally resonant electroacoustic music. This double disc set offers an extensive portrait of Wright's work, opening up with the threatening hum of 'Urban Wolves', a piece that escalates in intensity, slowly fleshing out what began as an oddly hollow-sounding sonic husk, only to segue into the unnerving noise and field recording melange 'Death Ships Approaching', a piece soaked in baying crowd noises and electronically manipulated car horns. It gets better and better from here on, with Wright rattling through the too-short for its own good 'Glass Floor Vertigo' only to languish in the bowed expanses of 'The Big Fight'. The second disc is no less enthralling, serving up the thirty-five minute, epic title track that functions as the disc's centrepiece. There's an effortless grace to these works that's reminiscent of the kind of music Stars Of The Lid excel at, albeit with a more expansive range of sound sources and possibly any even firmer grasp on gradual, chilling moroseness.