The wilds of Keeley Forsyth’s adopted home in the North of England seem to inhabit this, her third record. An often bleak and foreboding landscape surrounds the Yorkshire town in which Forsyth resides. The moors, on clear days, visible from her home studio window, impact upon a music that often feels made of these places. Windswept, rain soaked and blinking through the low-lit landscape. It is here through the gloaming mist that the storm breaks and the fox tears at the throat as the Red Kites circle to scavenge whatever’s left. “There was a sound I had in my head. One to reach, that hovers above and is slightly less grounded. But a sound and feeling that nonetheless is inevitably tethered to the soil”.
The title for the new collection derives from happening upon a long-abandoned mining shaft whilst out walking. At once alluring and hazardous, forced into a hillside, “there appeared a room and ever darkening hallway carved out of the ground. A place to be swallowed by, but also to emerge from”. It’s this push and pull that is reflected in the tone, craft, and preoccupations of The Hollow. The past lurking within and haunting the present we now occupy. A connection to time that places us within it, facing what is gone and what may come. But also, perhaps the harsh notion that time has no concern as to whether we are here or not. “There is a bleak dust that hides on the cracks”.
Working again with producer Ross Downes, (Photograph and Limbs) Forsyth desired to place the music to the side of any given genre. “We wanted to make something slightly more expansive, continuing to reference what we love from various genres without ever belonging to one”. It’s with this ethos that we recognise aspects of sacred music, minimalist post-classical, dark ambient, film and theatre soundtracks.
Tracklist:
1. The Answer
2. The Hollow
3. Come And See
4. Eve
5. Turning
6. A Shift
7. Slush
8. Drag Me Down
9. Do I Breathe
10. In The Corner
11. Horse
12. Creature