"A muddy green or staring blue..."

I never loved a dear gazelle
"We’ve been quite taken with Cindytalk‘s brand of slow and fogged-out synthery since hearing Up Here In The Clouds and The Crackle of My Soul, both released for Editions Mego. On Hold Everything Dear (EDITIONS MEGO 122), the solo effort of Gordon Sharp has been supplemented with contributions from Matt Kinnison, the record was recorded in Japan, London and Essex, it took them five years to complete it, and it’s got some connection to the work of John Berger, the polemical left-wing writer and broadcaster. None of this might actually be relevant to the music we hear, but it bears Sharp’s signature traits: layered, slow-moving blocks of processed sounds, informed by a sense of authority and sternness of furrowed brow that verges on the severe. More romantic moments do intrude in the form of short and distant piano music fugues, and little excerpts of field recordings such as the voices of children which open the record. Yet for some reason, these glimpses of hope serve only to add to the abiding sorrow of this record, which seems to be taking universal pessimism about the state of the world into a metaphysical dimension; titles like ‘Waking the Snow’, ‘Hanging in the Air’ and ‘Floating Clouds’ are laced with the sort of cryptic symbolism you’d associate with an ascetic philosopher who has virtually withdrawn himself from all human intercourse and retreated into a world of private signs and meanings. Far more than producing vacant droning, Cindytalk manages to invest his work with complex undercurrents and overtones. Where the Droneskvadronen All-Stars are content to issue largely non-associative sounds which allow listeners to project their own delusions and fantasies, Cindytalk constructs his music to deliver all the intellectual content of an essay from a Marxist journal from the 1970s…also exists as a double LP set."

Ed Pinsent review for The Sound Projector.

I never loved a dear Gazelle–
Nor anything that cost me much:
High prices profit those who sell,
But why should I be fond of such?
To glad me with his soft black eye
My son comes trotting home from school;
He’s had a fight but can’t tell why–
He always was a little fool!
But, when he came to know me well,
He kicked me out, her testy Sire:
And when I stained my hair, that Belle
Might note the change and this admire
And love me, it was sure to dye
A muddy green, or staring blue:
Whilst one might trace, with half an eye,
The still triumphant carrot through
(Lewis Carroll)