Dil Brito’s Fences Glimpses Glances is a finely orchestrated meditation on the locations in which it was made.
Musical experimentalists Dil Brito approach creating albums like a young child might when making a Play-Doh meal: as long as some semblance of the shape and form is there, it doesn’t matter what colour the plate, pasta, or salad ends up being. In fact, the more hues blend and blur together, the more successful the outcome. 2018’s Mote and 2019’s Lowing are variations of the band’s self-styled “alt-folk soft-noise songs.” Their latest release, Fences Glimpses Glances, takes their amorphous, ambient instrumentation and pumps it through their noodle-makin’ fun factory for a finely orchestrated meditation on the locations where Dil Brito recorded the album.
As has been Dil Brito’s enigmatic nature, they offer little specificities about themselves or Fences Glimpses Glances, save to say that the album is the result of “a year of sonic experimentation and exploratory songwriting” whose themes and music focus on the rural and urban locations across British Columbia in which it was recorded. Album opener “Seedlings” takes root early, burbling up from what feels like a mash of field recordings into a fluid jazz improvisation that branches out in its scond half to take on a soulful shuffle. The underlying field recordings flow directly into “Radio,” an folky acoustic ballad that blooms into beautiful harmonies. “Haven’t Gone to Work Today” is a pastoral psychedelic trip down backroads billwy fields, while “A Lull in Conversation From Another Room” is a exactly what its name implies: a muted tropical delight that blooms around the three-minute mark when the sound of a door opens and we join the discussion already in progress.
A record as weird and wonderful as Fences Glimpses Glances deserves an equally wacky release. As has become their tradition, DIl Brito set up a listening station on September 17 somewhere in Vancouver and teased its location on social media. Whether you discover Fences Glimpses Glances by stumbling on this listening station or streaming it digitally (sadly, there’s no physical version planned at the moment), Dil Brito’s most recent musical foray is fun to play on whatever platform you choose to consume it.
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