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Artist
Mick Turner may seem like an unlikely candidate for a collection of rarities/b-sides/compilation tracks, but here it is, and it is glorious. While most widely recognized for his work with the Dirty Three, Turner’s paired-down, more pensive solo material bares an inevitable stylistic similarity and is every bit as stirring. An Aussie wunderkind of meditative guitar poetry, he goes by his own name when composing alone, Tren Brothers when collaborating as a duo with D3 drummer Jim White, yet always rouses sound into songs like weather. Even when separated completely from the cover art/album title’s power of suggestion, his work actually comes across like sketches windblown winter trees would make with lead or ink-tipped branches; at one point a naked poplar (“Angel #1”), at another a swaying willow (“Away”), elsewhere a blustery eucalyptus (“Angel #5”). While it seems that only in nature can a body find parameters worthwhile enough to describe the palpitating gorgeousness of Turner’s compositions, any specifically pastoral imagery is inevitably the listener’s own. What any piece of instrumental music is “about” is generally anybody’s guess, let alone a swath of songs compiled from sporadic elsewheres and composed, for the most part, independently, with no intrinsically unifying theme (except for the five “Angel” pieces, all of which come from the out-of-print Seven Angels EP, released by Three Lobed Recordings in 2002). Individually, though, there’s nothing random about them, a