Berceuses & Nocturnes by Sheldon Suter

Sheldon Suter: Percussion, Zither, Portable Turntable, Shruti Box, Harmonica

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transparent as the shadows of icicles, incorporated in the night-plasma (Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House)

To listen to Berceuses et Nocturnes, the debut solo album from Swiss drummer and composer Sheldon Suter, is to enter a hallucinatory night-realm animated with hypnagogic serenades and starlit reveries.

Originally starting out as a jazz drummer, but more recently embarking on a boundless quest into non- idiomatic abstraction, notably with the Big Bold Back Bone quartet, Suter has again seemingly reconciled the irreconcilable, fusing genres of different eras and regions in a series of enticingly original, genre-busting forms.

Berceuses et Nocturnes derives its influence from Indonesian gamelan and Satie’s chimerical piano works, but also the Reichian-indebted minimalism of Chicagoan post-rockers Tortoise and woozy time-warping turntablist mumble of The Caretaker, to ferment its captivating after-dark seductions. Bowed zither and cymbals fuse with the somnambulant whirr of a shruti-box to intensify the continuous ripple of gong chime flowing like enchanted cryptography from a carillons à musique; morse code for divine messengers.

Without recourse to overdubs or loop machines, Suter sustains Berceuses et Nocturnes’ rarefied meditations, glistening particles lingering like lullaby kisses upon the lips of the heavy-lidded, as he sows his radiant constellations, cosmic tintinnabulations ringing through obsidian night, haunting the great halls of sleep.

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