HAM006
Northerner 'I Am On Your Side'
Release date: March 2012
Northerner's previous full length, 'The Ridings' dealt in the kind of hushed, glacial, ambient guitar soundscapes which placed the Bradford based guitarist, Martin Cummings, very comfortably within the post-everything ambient scene exemplified by the Touch, Home Normal and Hibernate labels.
Not this time.
Cummings has upped the ante in quite spectacular fashion. Soaking up all manner of leftfield influences from dub techno to micro house, instrumental hip hop, funk, soul and dubstep to chilling post industrial noise to create an album of wildly varying textures all held in place by Cummings’s gorgeous, heavily effected Vini Reilly inspired guitar playing.
Nothing if not ambitious, this is an album which stretches its head over the parapet, unafraid of musical progression and genre splicing yet, crucially, retains a warm melodic heart. A beautiful series of snapshots of what can be achieved with the guitar and other machines.