WOVEN
(World Citizen)
7/10
Yeshe Reiners eschews extravagant musical gestures in favour of compressed melodies, repetitive rhythms and nuanced textures. This five-track EP epitomises his capacity to make so much out of so little. His songs are really hypnotic musical settings for half-spoken poetry laced with a refrain. My Further Shore was written with Harry Manx, with whom he has much in common vocally and in terms of using exotic textures to animate the repetition.
At the heart of those textures is Yeshe’s kamele ngoni and restrained percussion, but occasionally a striking sound leaps from the thickets, as Tenzin’s Choegyal’s voice does on My Further Shore, and Cye Wood’s violins do on the more dramatic Captain of My Soul, a song about the power of self-determination. Ultimately Yeshe’s music is about casting spells and then keeping the listener bound within them. Some may find his scope too narrow, but I find that not only do the spells work, they are about spreading truth rather than the pretence of a greater theatricality.