I remember liking Solid Air, and I went back and checked my notes for it but, no, couldn’t remember a single tune from it; and my notes say I listened to it twice. However, once the voice came in on the opening track for this album (Dealer) I did, at least, remember the kind of sound that Martyn created.
For Solid Air I called Martyn’s music “Folk Plus” as it was largely folk at heart but with added elements of funk and jazz (largely). Here, I think the “folk” elements are almost entirely subsumed by the jazz-funk, especially near the start of the album, but there are new sounds emerging as well. It was a little like Traffic in that indefinable mix of sounds – perhaps not surprising since Steve Winwood features on several tracks. Despite this, Winwood is more of a background feature throughout, most notable for his ambient Moog sounds on Small Hours.
This is a very ambient, trip-hop kind of piece, 8-minutes of the most sparse arrangement you can think of, calming and unnerving in equal measure. Apparently producer Lee “Scratch” Perry recorded this outside, and so actual ambient sounds like geese and a passing train are real events, not later effects overdubs.
And talking of “dub”, the Martyn/Perry track Big Muff (not about what you might think...*) is credited with being the start of trip-hop, using Jamaican dub sounds as its base but building upon it with Martyn’s fragmentary jazz-folk. It’s all quite intriguing as a sound, and one of those albums that is deceptive at first, seeming quite simplistic until you start picking the music apart and realising what a tangled weave there is underneath.
Oddly, as with Solid Air, it doesn’t leave me humming any of its melodies – it's just not that kind of music – but it did leave me with a sense of having experienced something transformative.
*Unless you think it's named after an effects pedal. Come back at the end of the Eighties for this to crop up again.
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