Irian Jaya by Alex Crispin & Nicholas Whittaker

From Klaus Schulze to the ECM sound, some of the most transcendent music can seem simultaneously glacial and warm. ‘Irian Jaya’ achieves this over four spacious pieces recorded in 2016. Alex Crispin and Nick Whittaker have known each other for three decades, two of which have been spent making music together. This journey has taken them from bedroom recordings in their childhood home town, via the Brighton progressive rock band, Diagonal, and Whittaker’s guest appearances on Crispin’s Baron albums, to the latter’s studio in Nottingham where they began life as a duo.

The album's sound is singularly personal but the debts to Harold Budd, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Steve Roach and Paul Horn are lovingly paid. Crispin plays metallophone and synthesisers, providing a bedrock for 'Irian Jaya' that is as sensitive as it is esoteric: one moment evoking the momentousness of sacred prayer bells in ‘Escarpment’, the next, toy-box hypnosis in ‘Mesa’. Whittaker’s intimate saxophone slow-waltzes above this, percolating distant cloudiness in ‘Equinoctial Storms’, and hazy, earnest lyricism in ‘Tephra’. The latter features percussion from both members alongside Crispin's 12-string guitar, in a sensuous mise en scene of tropical ambient new age jazz.

"I’m still enthralled with the hand-tooled 21st century new age of Alex Crispin’s album Idle Worship (2017), a shimmering, glowing, wondrous thing. So it’s a joy to find the British multi-instrumentalist scaling similar heights on Irian Jaya. This time he hooks up with longtime friend Nicholas Whittaker who features on saxophone and various exotic percussion. It’s got that tropical South-East Asian feel to it as per the album’s title, but it’s a special kind of exotica, deftly merging Asian folk and free jazz elements with panoramic drones and ethereal new age synths." - Ambient Music Guide

Alex Crispin and Nick Whittaker, two musicians who explore the outer reaches of ambient, new age, jazz and all points in between. Their sound is led by Crispin's keyboards and Whittaker's woodwinds augmented with varying percussion. With a past in rock music they bring a lyrical sensibility to their spacious, exotic soundscapes.