Dave, I may have sounded overly dismissive of the Yellah fellah. It’s just that I find his sound a tad thin and 1-dimensional, and too obviously ‘pluck-y’. To clarify, I’m a(n ex-)guitarist myself, but I do like to hear the more natural sound of plucked or finger-picked guitar veiled, blurred and/or stretched by FX or technology. Anyway, as a reference point for Milieu, I don’t see the Norman reviewer’s invoking of Yellow6 as especially appropriate. True, Brian Grainger (aka Milieu) occasionally plucks a guitar, but he pays a lot more attention to the surrounding grain/texture of sound (i.e. ambience, by any other name) – things to do with *interventions* at the recording and post-production stages between source sound and actual output. This is where, for me, a lot of the interest is created by the likes of Infraction artists, adding something over and above the more WYSIWYG style of Yellow6. I guess I’d refer to the likes of David Tagg (see Waist Deep Seas of Milk) or Jason Sloan (see esp. Still) as ‘altered states’ guitar-toters who work along the lines I prefer. Then again, what they produce is often far removed from the kind of that ‘natural’ guitar sound that many devotees of the instrument enjoy - a sound more in the Labradford/GYBE! (quiet bits) tradition.
Anyway, I haven’t heard the latest Milieu release yet - apart from the track in the Infraction myspace player, and that plucked thing sounds more like a harp than anything.
