On paper, Songlines sounds like a meeting you’d expect to be tasteful, cerebral, and impeccably behaved. In practice, it’s something stranger and more human: a quiet tug-of-war between breath and circuitry, where neither side wins and that’s exactly the point.
Gareth Davis approaches the bass clarinet less as an instrument than as a bodily extension. You hear lungs working, air resisting, wood responding with a dark, pliable grain. His sound doesn’t announce itself; it seeps in, patient and unflashy, carrying the weight of a career that comfortably spans orchestral premieres, free improvisation, noise, and cross-disciplinary work. Davis has long been fluent in different musical dialects, and here he chooses to speak slowly, almost sotto voce, trusting nuance over drama.

Robin Rimbaud, a.k.a. Scanner, meets this with electronics that feel less designed than encountered. His textures hover, crackle, and dissolve like half-caught radio signals or memories that refuse to stay still. Decades into a practice that has ranged from surveillance-inflected sound art to ballet scores and permanent installations, Rimbaud still seems most interested in the in-between: the hiss behind the message, the system noise we’re trained to ignore. On Songlines, that sensibility doesn’t dominate - it listens.

The two long pieces, "Structure of Statements" and "Figurative Language", play a subtle conceptual joke. They promise clarity and rhetoric, but deliver ambiguity and drift. Themes don’t develop so much as wander. Electronics don’t accompany the clarinet; they sidle up next to it, occasionally brushing shoulders, occasionally stepping back into shadow. The music breathes, stalls, resumes - like thought itself, when it’s not being forced into productivity.

The idea of “songlines” - imagined routes, personal geographies stitched together from memory and movement - fits neatly without ever becoming illustrative. This isn’t travelogue music. It’s what remains after travel: blurred landmarks, distorted accents, impressions stripped of context but still emotionally charged. Places that may never have existed, yet feel oddly familiar.

What Songlines ultimately offers is resistance: to speed, to resolution, to the expectation that collaboration must result in synthesis. Davis and Rimbaud don’t merge their languages; they let them coexist, friction intact. The result is music that feels suspended between intention and accident, clarity and interference.

It won’t shout to be heard. It won’t explain itself. But spend time with it, and it quietly recalibrates your ears - reminding you that meaning often lives not in what’s said, but in how long we’re willing to listen.