It can be difficult to believe that it is more than thirty years since we first heard Dot Allison. In the early 1990’s hers was the voice that infused One Dove’s infectious electronic dance music with a cool yet welcoming humanity, making their 1993 LP ‘Morning Dove White’ both an impeccable classic of its time and classically timeless. Yearning for a past that is impossible to reclaim is a wasted energy, however, and besides, Dot Allison has an exemplary catalogue of records under her own name that spans those three decades between then and now. There may have been a twelve-year gap between ‘Year 7 1/2’ and 2021’s ‘Heart-Shaped Scars’ but those intervening years hardly blunted Allison’s ability to beguile with a voice delicately poised in the space between cool detachment and mellow earthiness.
New release ‘Consciousology’ continues Allison’s journey into the mystical space where music meets the natural realm in a symbiotic relationship. This is not accidental, for in dedicating the record to her musician mother and botanist father, Allison strives to produce something which might be “an imagined voice of a conscious universe expressed through music”. She also suggests that the record “takes a less mechanistic, inanimate but more infinitely complex view of the nature of reality and how feelings of love and loss – and consciousness itself – are potentially less ‘molecular’ in nature and more electromagnetic.” Now this might sound pretentious and over-reaching, but it ought not to, for there is surely a place for higher-brow conceptual thought within the realm of ‘popular music’ just as there is in the gallery or the pages of philosophical and/or scientific treatises?
As intriguing as these concepts and ideas are, however, it would be wrong to think that they might make ‘Consciousology’ heavy going. Instead, they are ideas and themes that underpin proceedings yet never overwhelm. It could be fairly easy, indeed, to let the album float by in a thoroughly enjoyable stream of, ahem, sub-consciousness and never trouble to peer into those deeper, darker waters beneath. Still, it is good to know that depth exists. That what could at first glance appear pretty and charming is in fact supported by something bristling with intelligence and experimental impulse.
Dot Allison might provide that experimental impulse, then, but ‘Consciousology’ is far from a completely solo effort, as collaborators on the record include the London Contemporary Orchestra and assorted Scottish string players, many of whose arrangements are by the peerless Hannah Peel. Allison’s label mate and Ride guitarist Andy Bell contributes to a couple of tracks, whilst P J Harvey collaborator Maria Mochnacz provides intriguing artwork comprised of text and colour fed through a shredder and assembled in spiralling explosions, like Cornelia Parker disassembling handbills. At first glance it may not look entirely fitting to the record it enfolds, yet this may be illusory. There is modernity here, but modernity that is pulled apart and rearranged into patterns dictated by the complex chaos of nature. The message might be that whilst Humankind might like to assume command of its environment, the reality is always only ever a thread away from collapse.
The players on ‘Consciousology’ then might be from the top shelf but there is nothing particularly showy or self-indulgent in anything here. Instead, almost everything is dialled back and often subtle to the point of evaporation. Opening track ‘Shyness of Crowns’ has the shimmer of Cocteau Twins heard through a pebblebed heat haze, is a Spring afternoon lying in the bluebells of Blackbury Camp gazing skyward and marvelling at the space given by the trees’ upper reaches to each of their partners’ (a phenomenon that gives the track it’s title). ’Unchanged’ ups the pace and in hindsight might be the odd one out on the record as it drives along with an electricity that prickles the skin. Not to say it’s upbeat exactly. Rather it throbs, pulsates with earthy magic and a peculiarly soft strength. ‘Bleached by The Sun’ and ‘Moon Flowers’ work beautifully as a pair. The songs are brittle, tender, like Bridget St John in a Francesca Woodman photograph or Anne Briggs and Vashti Bunyan clutching the midsummer moonrise under a cloak of violets. Strings throw morning mists across landscapes of gently plucked guitar. This is folk music glancing backwards over its shoulder whilst remembering tomorrow’s aches and aimless regrets that are no regrets at all.
‘220Hz’ is a bubbling punctuation mark in the record. To get back to those notions of conceptuality that thread through the album, 220Hz is apparently the frequency at which tree roots communicate through the earth. To me it sounds like Siren song echoing through the har. ‘Double Rainbow’ meanwhile is obfuscated psychedelia featuring “the electrical activity in a plant… translated into pitch variations”. It results in tremulous whispers in foreign languages heard through keyhole cracks and carried away on thermals. These are threads that weave through themselves on a loom of ancient oak, each picking up the ghosts impregnated in the grain. ‘Milk and Honey’, meanwhile sounds like Avalon glimpsed through a vaguely sceptical Scottish eye; deliciously appealing yet peculiarly alien and Other.
The album closes with the intimate ‘Weeping Roses’, a song inspired by a tape given to Allison by Andrew Weatherall in the ‘90s that included two songs by Tim Hardin. At that point Hardin was, if I recall correctly, one of the great unknowns. Certainly, someone forgotten and not yet brought back to the public’s attention. ‘Weeping Roses’ then is perhaps a hymn to the beauty of both Hardin’s songwriting and to the magical spirit of Weatherall, who inspired so many with his eternal enthusiasm both for music and art and, perhaps more critically, for sharing his passion without fear or favour. It is a song that one fears might disappear when one opens one’s eyes; that might yet dissolve into the star-speckled oblivion of the heavens.
Indeed, the whole of ‘Consciousology’ often sounds like it might barely be there; space more vital than the music that punctuates it. Space that breathes into sound, that gifts it with the opportunity to weave around us like the scents and the energies of the nature than envelops and invisibly penetrates us. It is a record that rewards multiple listenings with its delicate layers of meaning and depth of thought. Thirty years, it might suggest, is no time at all and yet all the time imaginable.
Alistair Fitchett. 2023.
‘Consciousology’ by Dot Allison is out now on the Sonic Cathedral label: https://dotallison.bandcamp.com/album/consciousology
.