MYSTIQUE REVIEW FROM THE AGE
MIKE DALEY REVIEW OF SOUTHERN MYSTIQUE
IF, AS I did, you enjoyed River Red last Thursday, from ABC-TV’s excellent Wildscreen documentary series, you may have noted the atmospheric musical score by Simon Lewis. This enterprising young musician has been performing and recording steadily since graduating in 1991 from the University of Melbourne (he majored in jazz piano and composition. His latest album, Southern Mystique, completes a trilogy of home-recorded titles (Southern Waters and Southern Dreaming are the others) inspired by our majestic south-west coast.
It's the kind of music you put on to shut out the city roar, conjuring up images and sounds of windswept cliffs, gulls wheeling over the foam as the setting sun sinks into a crimson ocean ... that kind of stuff! Lewis blends in natural and keyboard sounds, augmented by the multi-faceted percussion of Peter Neville (everything from shakers and Moroccan clay drums to an egg!), vocalist Lena Macdonald, other stringed instruments and, on the slowly cascading Soul of the Gorge, some Faye Dumont Singers.
The gentle piano ostinato on In The Clouds (The Dream of Flying), together with the wafting soprano saxophone of Nick Yates, reminds me in places of guitarist Ralph Towner's Icarus from a mid-'70s ECM album called Diary. It's a genre they used to label Third Stream jazz, but these days it's interchangeable with New Age or ambient. Whatever you call it, Southern Mystique is a captivating experience.