Well, this is all very nice nice. I have a vague impression of Neil Campbell having more releases to his name than all other recording artists put together - ever, and here's another one which he's slipped out without an excess of ceremony and which doesn't sound like any of the others I've heard. Actually, of the others I've heard, a great number of them have been fairly noisy, which this isn't. The subheading on the Bandcamp page seems to be music for thumb piano, flute, and voice, which is what it is, although the flute sounds a lot like a recorder - as such arguably representing one of the few examples of a recorder sounding as good on the album as it probably did inside the artist's head - and there isn't much voice that you would notice, plus I'm fairly sure I could hear a Casio VL-1 in there somewhere. Roll the Vole to the Owl comprises seven vaguely folky instrumental pieces - at least atmospherically speaking - definitely free-range and home grown without chemical interference. It falls somewhere between a slightly friendlier relative of the Residents' Eskimo and Robert Cox's Rimarimba without all of the mathematics. Repeat listening gradually reveals electronic activity way down in the mix, at least as pertains to the recording process, but it's not obvious. Roll the Vole to the Owl is so unassuming, so lacking an agenda, that it's hard to know what to say about it once we've established that it's a truly beautiful and perfectly formed piece of work, so I guess I'll leave it at that.
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