By Killian Laher
For the uninitiated among you (which might well be all of you), Dakota Suite is the name under which Leeds-based musician Chris Hooson releases music. Despite his singer-songwriter beginnings he has moved increasingly into the area of classical music. After toiling away in (mainly) obscurity for the last 15 years or so, his latest release North Green Down is a 98 minute long collaboration suite with Italian ambient/electronica experimentalist Emanuele Errante. It was written as a response to the death of Chris’ sister-in-law.
The music is largely piano-based, with ambient creaks, scrapings and static, along with more conventional embellishments of guitar, cello, woodwind and strings. There is a single theme (the title track) in seven movements, interspersed with related pieces. The theme itself is based around a cinematic piano motif which recurs across this album. For music as sparse as this, it is the delicate touches of guitar, fingers scraping across fretboards which really make it.
On A Worn Out Life (with Cello), the aforementioned cello makes a dramatic entrance, dominating one of the more fleshed out pieces here, similarly in They Could Feel The End Of All Things. Despite the very minimalist template, there are the minutest of variations throughout, keeping this from becoming too similar. Some of the titles are in Dutch (the jazzy-sounding Leegte, the Eno-like Wat We Kwijt Zjin)
A Hymn to Haruki Murakami, and later, Nobody Is Ever Safe and the non-cello version of A Worn Out Life showcase Chris’ minimal guitar picking. There are touches of Satie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and even a little Red House Painters (circa Ocean Beach) creeping in here and there across this album, along with the more orchestral side of Tindersticks? A Loveless Moment is particularly cinematic, with prominent strings and eerie, foreboding piano, while at the other end of the scale, No Greater Pain has the ambient noise pushed out front.
Best heard as a whole, in one sitting, rather than digested in individual tracks. This sort of music does not fit into mp3 culture, and requires patience. It cannot be listened to ‘on the go’ or while doing something else as it simply does not fight for your attention. Rather it sits there in solitude, prettily doing its thing, unafraid to toil away in isolation, but greatly rewards attention given to it. Sit and listen.
