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The sound of lapping water around my ears tells me it must be time to pick myself out of the blurry gutter I find myself in post Hogmanay shenanigans before I am run over by the fast-approaching lorry containing 2007’s release schedule.

Or it could be just one of the found sounds employed by Warp Records’ resident insect-botherer Mira Calix to create her new album of digital symphonies.  In Eyes Set Against The Sun, the minimal constructions heard on releases such as 2003’s Skimskitta have gone widescreen, yet still manage to keep the microscopic attention to detail which fills her work with such intrigue.  As well as the aforementioned watery gurgle, parts including children’s choirs, mulch underfoot, piano and thumb piano, bird song, and a million other sounds I can just about make out are all herein.  They are soldered seamlessly to an orchestral body, glowing white hot, flowing like liquid, cooling to brittle metallic chill, as Calix fuses the disparate elements of her preceding recordings to create this thoroughly rewarding piece of work.

Standout tracks are often around the ten-minute mark.  “The Way You Are When” sounds like one of Calix’s London Sinfonietta collaborations, a buzz of menace presaging an elegy’s tumble to skittery mechanical death.  “Eelio” features a piano being set adrift at windy sea, its stately notes ringing in sharp contrast to the oh-so-Warp beats of the subsequent “Umbra/Penumbra”, before “One Line Behind” ends the album in dramatic fashion.

From a now semi-lucid and markedly more upright position, I cast my gaze to the horizon for the first rays of the new year.  I rejoice with Eyes Set Against The Sun.  After last month’s socially dysfunctional list-building fest, let me be the first to say that this is the album of the year so far.

Listen to “Umbra/Penumbra” here
Listen to more and buy it at Boomkat here