Fire Nearby: Fruits of Patience

Perennial shapeshifter, David McLean, returns with his latest sound exploration, Fire Nearby. The Manchester experimentalist is joined by guitarist and regular collaborator, David Birchall, and together on the project’s debut LP, Fruits of Patience, they carve out a series of slow-motion sketches that recall the inner grains of sound that led to the birth of post-rock.

With so much new music at the disposal, it’s funny how things align. Just last week, Papa M’s David Pajo released the excellent Ballads of Harry Houdini, and it landed in the orbit just days before Fruits of Patience – something that resonates deeply with core ideas Pajo has delivered through various guises over the years.  

While sonically, Fire Nearby may seem like a world away from McLean’s endeavours in Aging and, most notably, the collaboration alongside Liverpool’s Land Trance in 2021 Embassy Nocturnes, it’s not as far away as some might think. A closer listen not only reveals a line that becomes more prominent, but also one that connects both projects; the narcotic echoes, resonating back and forth.

Recorded over several afternoons, essentially, Fruits of Patience is open-source post-rock that moves through a portal that leads to new space. Birchall and McLean deliver something that is grounding, not only stymying the fast-paced nature of this world, but freezing time altogether.

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The prolonged, transcendental jam of Like Footsteps begins the journey with something that is cut out for cold winter mornings pottering around the house. Elsewhere, Tears of Cotton Mills and Grass Filled with Rain are cinematic crawls that cultivate that same new space, and it’s these moments that inform Fruits of Patience. On the former, poet, Lauren McLean, features with a raw, sleepy-eyed poem that matches the whirring intensity of the song itself.

Then there’s On Night Bus Through Furzton and closer, Angel on the Roof. Meandering at a snail’s pace, Birchall chisels out rambling guitar lines that seep into the pores, and with McLean’s field recordings fermenting underneath the mix, there’s an energy not a world away from Blake Conley’s Droneroom.

On Slept In My Coat parts I and II the pair dig further, with Jarmuschian post-rock lullabies that feel like the origins of post-rock committed to tape. And speaking of, it’s the Tortoise-like allure of Broken Glow that really encapsulates the ideas of Fruit of Patience. Beautiful, slow arcs of sound that blossom with the kind of possibilities that are a welcoming contrast to these times. Possibilities where room to breathe and gather your thoughts are aplenty. Space to disengage from a world that moves so fast, it’s out of control. There’s a gravitational pull in Fire Nearby’s sound world that reaches the inner core, and it’s achieved purely through the exploration of sound.

Fruits of Patience is out now via Tombed Visions Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.