Philip Jeck’s latest album for Touch, Sand (alliteratively aligning itself with Seven, Soaked and Stoke), is even more explicit about its reflective nature than usual, coming as it does with a quote from Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Chariot” on the cover. Like the poem, the album feels like a heavy-hearted reminiscence on the course of a life, with its long-distant highs long worn away by the falling sands of time. The end result is almost unspeakably moving, and may well be Jeck’s masterpiece.

Like the aforementioned chariot, Sand proceeds at funeral cortege pace past the monuments that mark the most memorable moments of an existence. From between the crackles of “Unveiled” escape the sounds of fairgrounds and carefree days, which are all too soon swallowed up by the swelling sounds of the clocks in “Chime Again”. There are three “Fanfares” on Sand; the first comes next, its layers of brass gloriously heralding a blossoming. After this the album turns greyer and in on itself through the bleak “Shining” and the heavily decayed “Fanfares Forward” (a dense rush of barely-discernible shadows). By the time of “Residue“, the music is ineffably distant and elegiac, only half-remembered. “Fanfares Over” is a hellish afterlife, long, jarring and disorientating, becoming interred in an eternally locked groove headed, like the chariot itself, for eternity.

This is the second great recording Jeck has been involved with this year, after the new recording of Gavin Bryars’ “Sinking of the Titanic” which soaked up such praise a few months ago. This is an even better trip through (a) history, guided by the sure hands of a pioneer. Sand is truly unforgettable. Buy it now from the untouchable Touch.