The Obvious I

The Obvious I, the second album from Ed Dowie, is the second new master release from Needle Mythology, the label founded by music writer, author and broadcaster Pete Paphides. The Obvious I marks a pronounced evolution from Dowie’s earlier music. Adhering to Kraftwerk’s maxim about achieving the maximum emotional impact by the most minimal means. The first track taken from the album Robot Joy Army is a synergy of clockwork beats and somnambulant harmonies, which brings the album to a mesmerising conclusion. Somehow it’s a song as apposite to cold war Russia as it is to basement dwellers in overpopulated South Korean conurbations and shift workers at Amazon Fulfilment Centres.

The Obvious I is a record that would see Dowie drawing on musical lessons learned throughout his life: from his childhood as a chorister in Dorset, taught to play piano by his father who himself composes choral classical 20th Century Music, to pivotal friendships made following the dissolution of his first group Brothers In Sound, when Dowie enrolled to study Music, Technology And Innovation at De Montford University in Leicester. The first module studied by Dowie during his time in Leicester introduced him to the work of minimalist composers such as Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and La Monte Young. “It helped break down the barriers between what pop is and what all this other stuff is. I love the way sometimes little pockets of beautiful melodies sneak into the world of experimental music – Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the songs of Cornelius Cardew, the beauty and emotion in something like Terry Riley’s In C, and obviously the way the work of minimalists Philip Glass and Steve Reich seem to stray into quite sentimental areas.”

The Obvious I was co produced by pioneering British experimental musician and sometime member of Polar Bear “Leafcutter John” Burton. Each song from The Obvious I is the culmination of a beautiful process of distillation. A crystal extracted from chaos. Tumult distilled into lullaby.