Sourmilk

"Everybody Is Turning To Gold" (Album, 2023)

Everybody Is Turning To Gold is the second album by sourmilk. Sourmilk is Andrew Kesbey. With this album, Andrew has succumbed to the exciting synth worlds of modular and eurorack.
Starting with the techno influence and driving acid pulse of Blindsight, the journey continues with Coruscation - field recordings from a summer’s afternoon combined with a repeating understated, slightly ominous phrase, overtaken by skittering percussion.

Flexis is the sound of a rusted electric guitar, sonically blurred and distorted through an ancient radio. An indistinct mantra fades in and out of the background as the main riff veers between percussive and distorted.

Scour begins with a chattering, wah-wah style riff and insistent percussion before submitting to woozy, disorienting Boards of Canada style strings that build in intensity. While All Is Love incorporates a sample of a snowstorm run through a series of resonators to create a gradually evolving ambient piece that builds to a gentle arctic crescendo, before a crystalline resolution.

With Psalter 11, the album is plunged into the darkness of a never-ending underground-whistling, acid-rattling, brain blurring trip, only to find its arrival is also its departure point. The phaser driven locomotive of Let Perplexity Increase evokes a drum and bass neo-Hawkwind, as a furious breakbeat drives through of sonic tunnel.

With Hallowed the passenger arrives and alights. Stepping out from the ride, wandering through a wind-sucking tunnel to find the gold. It is at this point, everybody and everything is glistening.

Journeying from breakbeat to kosmische while retaining the tenebrous influences of its predecessor, Everybody Is Turning To Gold widens the sonic range from the dark ambient soundscapes and field recordings of sourmilk’s debut, and delivers a satisfying and unsettling, somnambulant and insistent album.

Is it a concept album? Is it a journey from A to C? Whatever it is, it delivers with every step. 8/10

Edwin Huxley (February 2023)