Isobel Waller-Bridge casts a large net with her film scores. Her work on such films and TV series as Munich: The Edge of War, Sweetpea, Emma, Fleabag, and the BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse shows a composer who is refreshingly eclectic and varied. Her latest release, however, may be her most striking move yet.
Objects is a solo album that Waller-Bridge refers to as “an act of radical stillness”. Combining the sounds of her surroundings and filtering them through minimalism and musique concrète, she creates a musical atmosphere that is more inward-gazing, slower, and more reflective.
The album comprises pieces that are “simple, strange, and lovingly handmade”, Waller-Bridge explains in the record’s press notes. “Oddities that feel to me like small miracles. They reflect how I move through the world: with curiosity, with slowness, and with an openness to the unexpected music in everything.” The opening track, “Pillow”, begins with a scratchy, lo-fi bed, followed by slow, repetitive notes, sustained chords, and ethereal choruses of calm. The song gives the air of a solemn, reflective, breathing thing.
Other tracks like “Glass” and “Tapes” are awash in fuzzy, spacey slabs of synthesizers, but always at a pace that encourages stillness and calm – and not without an underlying tension. “Objective Contemplation” is filled with a jazz atmosphere, particularly the spiritual kind, thanks to expressive horn sections backed by orchestral swells.
Tracks like “Hoover” revel in a luxuriously uncomplicated buzz of low-end strings and keyboards that occasionally flirt with film score tropes but remain insistently experimental and off-kilter. The tactile buzzes and clicks that permeate “Ball” and the tone experiment “HZ” show Waller-Bridge constantly playing with different ideas, expanding them as far as her imagination allows.
The “radical stillness” that Isobel Waller-Bridge refers to in Objects is a wonderful place for a listener to get lost. The worlds are varied and lush, and never dull. “This album isn’t about performance,” she explains. “It’s about presence.”