ANDREW HEATH – LIGHTING BEACONS
Lighting Beacons was released early April this year, shortly before Andrew Heath‘s new full album A Trace of Phospor (see below). It is his “response to the strange times we all find ourselves in at the present. Lock-down and self-isolation have so quickly become the new normal and yet, within this slightly surreal time, a quiet calm has come about.”
Calm is the keyword here, as in much of Andrew Heath’s music. Calm and dreamlike, “yet at times slightly dissonant”. Piano notes, electric and acoustic, float through the air, the soundscape subtly filled with environmental sound that feel like a walk in a park on a sunny day.
To soften the worries about the current times, such as the live performances being postponed, Heath offers this 20-minute mini-album as a free (Name Your Price) download.
ANDREW HEATH – A TRACE OF PHOSPHOR 
A Trace Of Phosphor is the follow-up album of June 2019’s A Gift for the Ephemerist with Anne Chris Bakker. (Not counting the short Lighting Beacons EP mentioned before). It was created “during an intense and very dark period of time over the winter […], often at night or in the early hours of morning when I found sleep difficult.”
According to Andrew Heath the result is “a much darker and more melancholic sound than I’m used to, but one that is very intimate.”
Heath has developed a distinctive trademark sound that can almost be called a genre in itself. It’s easy to hear the melancholic and intimate, but personally I do not experience this music as ‘dark’. The soft and slow evolving piano themes, merging with environmental sounds from the Cotswolds area in England, may refer to cold winter nights somewhat – but they also bear the bright promises of Spring.
On two tracks, Will The Angels Still Hear Me? and I Sleep Above The Forest, Lydia Kenny adds her beautiful soprano saxophone.
A Trace of Phosphor WAS shortly available in a limited ‘special art edition’ of 25, but of course that quickly sold out. No now only the digital version remains.
KONSTRUCT – COASTAL EVENT
Konstruct is a collaborative project of Andrew Heath (piano, synths, guitar, field recording, treatments), Alex ‘Phonsonic’ Caminada (flute, synths, field recordings, treatments), and Simon McCorry (cello, synth, treatments). Their Coastal Event is distilled from a five-hour concert in the summer of 2019 in the Shift arts and performance festival.
The concert was a continuous improvisation, a “constantly moving and cinematic soundscape that conjured expansive images of the sea and coastline” – hence of course the album title.
It is an immersive (and peaceful) 63-minute, 6-track set “that inspires themes of the hinter world that lies between the sea and the land.”
Coastal Event is a digital-only release.