Vanishing releases new album Shelter of the Opaque

Music

‘Shelter of the Opaque’ is the new album of state-of-the-nation spoken word, industrial electronics, sprawling free jazz, and evocative string-led minimalism by Vanishing, the project of Hull-born, Manchester-based musician Gareth Smith.

A former engineer, Smith has worked with Lonelady and Gnod, and emerged with his first release proper in 2017, a self-titled release that addressed themes of “isolation, claustrophobia, and disenfranchisement”.

Evoking late period Einstürzende Neubauten, Tony Conrad, Colin Stetson and semblances of Benjamin Britten, and with previous releases on Ransom Note affiliated label Outer Reaches, namely ’55°N, 5°E’ (2021) and ‘Ends Without Redress’ (2023), Smith’s work as Vanishing has transitioned from poignant, powerful explorations of personal lineage and working class history to music inspired by “the mills, the rivers [&] the cities” of Northern England.

Initially recorded at the Rotterdam arts space WORM with long-term collaborator & saxophonist Karl D’Silva (Drunk In Hell) & modular synth player Sam Weaver (Cuspeditions), the album is enriched by string parts recorded in Manchester and played by Ecka Mordecai as well as Otto Willberg and Agathe Max (both members of Charles Hayward’s Abstract Concrete project, him of This Heat). With mixing and mastering completed in Bradford, ‘Shelter of the Opaque’ is a record of many parts, assembled over time across Europe and the North, yet is free from excess, the result of “paring everything back”.

Inspired by urban walks around Manchester as well as writing sessions at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in Birkenhead, ‘Shelter of the Opaque’ encapsulates movements of atonal dread about the spectre of depression (‘I Dream of Circles’), stark, beautifully brooding elegies of monotonal pulsation and soaring strings (‘Maxim’), dramatic, crepuscular vistas arraigned with chattering drum machines and shadowy, sustained tones (‘Castling’) and more.

An album which ruminates on themes of alienation, specifically in the cities of the North, it’s a record that confronts the darkness and melancholy of quotidian realities, capturing an oblique perspective that nevertheless feels vital, expressive, and defiant. There’s the sense, at times, of the skies opening up and the light pouring in too, transcendence found through sonorous prose and lustrous composition. We can’t recommend this album enough.

As part of the release, Smith has revealed a new video for the track ‘Maxim’, suitably accompanied by a poetic introduction about the process of putting it all together: “Recorded 8mm film on a vintage Super 8 camera, a simple machine that operates without fuss. Edited with the same lean approach to the capture, a leaner 7am version of the city: proud, fascinating, silent, isolating”.

Watch the ‘Maxim’ video & the previous Dogme-95 style video for ‘I Dream of Circles’ below.