Without devolving into personal indulgence - though run with me on this please - one of the factors I love about delicate piano music, and to a lesser extent the neo-classical sound of recent, is the way in which it conjures a visage of which I myself am trying so desperately to establish for my own physically creative interests. To hail from a small village in the Northern reaches of Wales I imagine can only offer up an advantage to Ian M Hazeldine, recording under the name of Antonymes. Misshapen Beauty [i] is the delightful insight to a visage I continually long for myself: cosey isolation, endless fields, avoidance of unnecessary interraction...and best of all, the humble music room to which one can sit down, open up and let the fingers cast the individual into a void of discovery.
Taken from Hazeldine's There Can Be No True Beauty Without Decay (which admittedly is more than a credittable statement in today's World) released last month, Hazeldine's music blooms and blossoms into the present autumn draft of nightly air with its phasing strokes of piano and soothing violins nestling in the backdrop. The sound of Antonymes then is one of life but is arguably also one of safety - a sound that tucks itself comfortably into the abode of wooden floorboards and condensation-covered windows. Throughout the track's four minute length, Hazeldine barely removes himself from such home borders, yet there's no need to. His emphasis on the contrast between inside and outside, between the warmth of home and the cold exterior of 'house' as some impersonal shape, springs to life in a piece that is slow to uncurl itself, but eventually reveals a floral concoction of life within the cooling (if not freezing) ambience that is the music's surrounding space. So as Autumn rolls onwardly closer and closer into Winter - such a season standing as wonderous for some, yet challenging for others - you can take some comfort knowing that artists such as Antonymes will look to the tranquility amidst the frost, no matter how speckled or buried it might be. There Can Be No True Beauty Without Decay is out now via the artist's bandcamp.
~Jordan Helm
