Alula Down – ‘DELPHI’ (from ‘The Leyline’ LP)

Interspersed with field recordings, Alula Down’s ‘The Leyline’ contains seven longer pieces that are mesmerising meditations on landscape and transitional experience, made in response to a journey from Delos in the Aegean Sea, across mainland Greece, up the length of Italy and across France to Mont St Michel. This 2022 journey followed the Michael/Apollo Leyline, but one certainly does not need to believe in Alfred Watkins’ theories to appreciate the album, for the sounds it contains transcend the concept, as all the best conceptual art does. This is necessarily the sound of simplicity, whilst being far from simple. It is the sound of inhaling earth energy and exhaling a contemplation of our own impermanence.