Andrew Wasylyk :: Irreparable Parables

Irreparable Parables unfolds through unmistakably Scottish compositions, building a delicate form of orchestrated art-folk.

Wasylyk writes in a room in Dundee full of half-broken instruments. He picks one up, plays a little, looking for an idea, a feeling, a door left ajar. The detail says more than it seems, because Irreparable Parables is exactly a record of things that don't quite go back together — fractures personal, historical, collective — and its beauty lies entirely in the refusal to force them whole again. You grasp this fully only at the title track, where Wasylyk sings himself, his voice deliberately lowered, deep, almost held back: spoken word more than performance, a distant vein of the low-register Leonard Cohen, mallets and strings holding up the structure.

This is, officially, the record in which Wasylyk lets the human voice in for the first time. He sent the songs out to six singers scattered across the world, gathered their voices remotely, and brought them back to Scotland like migrating birds. Fittingly, Frances Castle draws them as six songbirds on the sleeve. The point is that these guests are never ornamental cameos: each enters carrying a different emotional and tonal accent.

Some bring the dark in. Kathryn Joseph, on "Spectators in the Absence of God", turns the piece into something almost liturgical: a vulnerability more exposed, more pained than anyone else's here, a passage that wouldn't look out of place beside the darkest Portishead, and the emotional high-point of the record. Gruff Rhys, on "The Cold Collar", leans the other way, towards a 1970s European library music warped by a faint unease: the song opens and closes around the voice, dragging the listener into the hesitations of the character speaking, all held-back irony and melancholy.

Others bring air. Saya Ueno of Tenniscoats, on "Hachi No Su", lets in an almost unreal lightness, as if Wasylyk had thrown a window open in the orchestral density: experimental jazz, light percussion to the fore, a music that keeps slipping out of its own structure. Molly Linen, on "Love Is a Life That Lasts Forever", marks the lightest moment on the record: a bass opening onto a pop drum kit, light trumpets, jazz barely touched in, a melody that floats — sophisticated folk-pop, pure. And Peter Brewis of Field Music, on "In Portmanteau", brings an energy of an altogether different kind: piano and strings that suggest something close to a contemporary Celtic dance before the voice comes in, then a modern orchestral folk full of rhythmic detours, where the record's more progressive side comes through. The opening falls to Stuart Murdoch, on "Private Symphony #2", and it sidesteps any monumentality at once: a lateral, almost domestic gait, a solemn piano among low strokes of bass and strings, small harmonic movements that appear and vanish from the room. There is something elegantly understated in that not-quite-declared delicacy.

But the heart of Irreparable Parables is the two tracks where Wasylyk is left alone with his own writing. "First Moonbeams of Adulthood" works for atmosphere and development at once: the opening guitar phrases give way progressively to the woodwinds, while piano and light pulses build a continuous forward motion, and the bass, particularly present, recalls the suspended, nocturnal tone of The Cure's "Sinking". And above all "Road to the Amber Room", the cinematic apex: a slow, layered geographical crossing, strings accumulating, melodic drifts that evade any resolution, the piano holding up the whole emotional frame. The title is not idle: the Amber Room — the Prussian chamber looted in the war and never recovered — is the perfect emblem of a record about what cannot be put back together. The piece looks towards an imaginary Eastern Europe, suspended between 1970s soundtracks and chamber jazz, without ever sliding into aestheticised nostalgia. It is here you see most clearly what makes Wasylyk so singular a presence: a language poised between chamber folk, European jazz, library music and cinematic impressionism, rooted in tradition yet unable to treat it as a relic. He lets the traces of the past surface — worn brass and woodwind, irregular melodies, orchestrations moving like atmospheric currents — over territory still alive.

The close turns wholly instrumental. On "Soul Enters the Ocean Sun Climbs Out of the Sea" the piano keeps a constant tension alive while the strings move around it, as if to contain it, slow it, absorb it. Less a conclusion than a slow drawing-away, consistent to the last with a work that doesn't believe in final reassemblies.