The composers and pieces on this album might not immediately stand out as having very much in common; this album is less portraiture than a journey that revels in eclecticism. If an image did come to mind, it would be something like an overflowing toybox, some kind of emporium of curiosities; but what appears to be child’s play portends something darker and ecstatic, particularly when rendered through the post-modern chaos of the electric guitar. 

William Blake — a radical searching for the revelatory, seen as old-fashioned in his own day — sums up this journey. The illustrations that accompany his writings disregard convention, demonstrate miraculous prescience of the Arts and Crafts movement, and present a vital auteurship of craft and philosophy exemplified in the often androgynous characters of his personal mythos. I would worry that posing him as ​‘the way in’ might seem a little grand, but the fecundity of his influence on so many artists eases that a little. Only he reflects the strange light and celestial ambition of the works presented here — Sean Shibe