The Towering Sky

Marsfield was a quartet of Andrew Chalk, Vikki Jackman, Brendan Walls and Robin Barnes. Chalk had worked with all three musicians before – Jackman on both his and her own albums; Walls on a collaborative album, This Growing Clearing; and Barnes, in a short-lived duo, Isolde. The Towering Sky nudges closer to the austere, gun-metal-grey improvisations of groups like Morphogenesis; “Marsfield Cathedral” teems with detail, as tectonic plates of TV-snow sound chafe against each other. “Marsfield Common” is more open, with banks of noise giving way to passages of abstruse clatter, full of muted piano and huffing, buzzing organs. The entire album sounds like it’s lost in a wind tunnel.