Well now, where do you start!

This album comprises original music in four parts composed by Scott Walker as the score to an interpretative dance piece for the CanCo Dance Company and performed on the South Bank recently by the London Sinfonietta.

It's music you can see, if you are not too scared too watch it, and has all the trademarks of Walker's recent output except the most obvious one - any vocals. Yet somehow by its very abscence Walker's distinctive, quavering voice is even more powerful, brooding, sinister, threatening and mind-buggeringly frightening than ever! How can this be? Beats me, and yet its there, haunting every track, hiding behind every tree. Somehow waiting.
And we wait for it too, uncomfortable in the knowledge that it is not there.

It's as if we are lost without it. We become the discordant violins running demonically between the crashing cellos, crashing wildly into one another. Here and there among the industrial drones and the rattling cymbals are the merest fragments of melody, but no sooner do we become aware of them and seek shelter in their company they are gone, thrown carelessly into the air with the rest of the loose ends.
And Who Shall Go to the Ball just builds and ominously builds, oozing atmosphere. Its expectant, foreboding narrative is (particularly in Part 3, the strongest track) at times brooding and sensuous and always unpredictable. As well as casually discarded snatches of melody there are elements of free-style interpretative jazz reminiscent of Robert Wyatt's Cuckooland, just flitting among the undergrowth like unseasonally late butterflies.
It closes with the darkest, apocryphal Track 4 which is truly cataclsymic. An extended D note drones to the fade, scratched and slapped at by another lost and hopelessly viola.

Enough adjectives? I think so - my head hurts.
Like The Drift earlier in the year, I am stunned by a piece of music. Scared, bewildered and yet mesmerised and refreshed.
To put Scott Walker's music into a box is to destroy it completely. This is pretty much on the edge of my experience, and of course for that reason alone, I think I absolutely love it.

But then to realise that Walker himself isn't here at all makes me feel uneasy. He is in every note, every scratch, every thundering dis-chord. He just eludes your outstretched fingers...