Wicket

Despite what you may have been told, repeatedly by ageing hipsters who stopped loving music the moment it wasn't propping up their youth or egos any more, we haven't heard it all before. Not by the longest chalk imaginable.

At the most basic level, we have 12 notes - in every octave - in the Western scale. We have a gearbox of tempos that'd put any Formula 1 team to absolute shame. We have an endless panorama of sounds - from instruments crafted from the most complex organic materials to circuit boards designed to flood the ear with the infinite, DNA-shaming complexity of the binary world.

We can combine those sounds to create ever more unique shadings. We can leap from slow to fast to waltz to anacrusic polyrhythm in the dotted beat of a bewildered heart. We can be quiet, we can be LOUD, and we can be *EVEN LOUDER STILL*.

We can sing in accents as unique as snowflakes, scattering words of infinite variety in a quilt of cultures and languages that are all the product and instrumentation of the boggling mathematics enabled by the billions of synapses in each and every one of our brains.

Every fingerprint on every guitar string on every fret through every amplifier is unique.

Every keystroke on every keyboard, through every VST plug-in, into the panoply of wonders opened up by Ableton Live, or Logic, or GarageBand, is unique.

Every snare hit with every different muscle combination in every different sounding room with every different microphone into every different mixing desk manned by every different engineer, is unique.

And this is just the meniscus above the limitless pool of fractal wonders that is music.

So, if some twit tells you it's all been done before, tell that twit it's because they're not listening anywhere near hard enough. Inform them - as loftily as you like - that what has been done before, to death, is idiocy and smugness. That not being able to see or hear wonder in the world is arch dogmatism and reductive ignorance. That there is nothing more tiresome than a know-it-all. That cynicism is in the desiccated brain of a half-arsed beholder.

There is infinity in that there raindrop on that there window-pane, and if *you* [we're still talking to the twit, here... not you; you... you're ace] can't see it, or aren't prepared to entertain it, then - kicking you off the back of this high horse for what will be more than a minute - I pity you.

You probably don't believe in love, either.

Well, if you don't believe in love or wonder, stop writing about, thinking about, or spreading your opinions about music. You're less than slurry - because at least slurry helps the little flowers grow.

To wit, and to repeat, we - none of us - have heard it all before.

If you're a music professional close to thinking that you have - even when another floater of pop punk bobs to the top of your inbox and proves difficult to flush - then step aside. You've become Mr Creosote blocking the doors to the kitchen - and the rest of us are famished.

Ravenous for sounds.

Wicket are from Cardiff. They make elegiac instrumental guitar music that sounds like the awe induced by a sunset over snow-peaked mountains. The twit would bang on about Mogwai, or Slint, or Sigur Ros, like I just did.

There's a bit of the twit in all of us, I reckon.

But if we can keep him down (and he is a him, no doubt about that) for the duration of this track, we'll hear the formative, pummelling rumbles of a new Welsh band who know that all the greatest sounds come from the heart, not just what has filtered through their souls from an iTunes library.

Wicket flow. They'll bear you along in their eddies of sound, sweep you to vistas new, if you're prepared to jump in. Although the twit would point out that, “man, haven't we had enough of mountains and glaciers, yet? These mountains and glaciers just aren't as fresh or awe-inducing as they were when I was a kid.”

Who're you going to listen to?

projectwicket.bandcamp.com - BBC