Hollis, Mark

“The minute you work with just acoustic instruments, by virtue of the fact that they’ve already existed for hundreds of years, they can’t date. When you’re looking at writing music, the ideal must be: I’d like to make music that can exist outside the timeframe. So your biggest chance of doing that, I guess, is working with instruments that by their nature don’t exist in a time period. So, no syndromes—great as they were....” —Mark Hollis, The Wire, January 1998  
 
Seven years after Talk Talk’s final record, Laughing Stock, Mark Hollis completed this self-titled solo album—to date the last thing he has put out. Where his previous band’s music started as hard synth pop and disintegrated into abstraction, Mark Hollis begins with silence, a full 20 seconds of room ambience. That breaks into compositions sprinkled with woodwinds and acoustic guitars, spread delicate and cerebral like Ulysses written on parchment paper. The album is relentless in its tranquility, nestling through contemplative moments without hurry before moving on. Hollis pushed his desire for an open record that nonetheless sounded utterly real and natural, and he achieved something that could just as easily pass like a wisp as endlessly be marveled at for its artistic splendor. 
Available for the first time on vinyl in the US, Mark Hollis has never sounded better, with every piece of each song coming into focus with striking clarity. No other record so beautifully captures the nothing of everything.