Pearson, Anton: Driving Through Belgium LP

There is a particular kind of strangeness that arrives on long drives across Europe. Flat light, service stations and fields stretching endlessly past the window. It might look mundane at first glance, but becomes faintly surreal when the tiredness of touring blurs the edges of everything. That feeling became the quiet engine behind "Driving Through Belgium", the debut solo album from Anton Pearson, best known as one of the guitarists in respected post-punk outfit Squid. It is a record shaped in the margins of touring, and finessed in the in-between hours. Across six pieces, Pearson leans into atmosphere, texture and space. It is ambient in spirit, adjacent to contemporary classical in feeling, but composed less with notes in mind than with sound itself. Much of the process began experimentally, feeding instruments into unfamiliar chains, pitching loops into unexpected registers and playing with previously unused synthesizers simply to see what they might reveal. The album was built with this experimentation at its core, as Pearson would layer then extract, processing stacks of sound until things blur and confuse.