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AVIA GARDNER - Mill Farm

AVIA GARDNER - Mill Farm
Intr-Version
MP3 Release // £5.99
MINIMAL / DANCEFLOOR
Released: Mar 2007
Catalogue Number: INTR018

For a band based on a faded photograph of a young girl, Avia Gardner have been remarkably productive. Made up of Montreal electronic stalwart and Intr_Version label boss Mitchell Akiyama and chanteuse Jenna Robertson, Avia Gardner is purported to be the ‘voice’ of this young girl as imagined by the duo and ‘Mill Farm’ is their debut album following the lovely maxi-EP ‘More than Tongue can Tell’. Unsurprisingly they have kept their intentions intact and are still striving to produce haunted vocal music, the music of lost tapes and dusty gramophone records and when they do it this good who’s complaining? The album kicks off with the porch-folk of ‘Between Our Pages’ which actually bears more of a relation to the Digitalis catalogue or the work of Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice and their contemporaries than the ageing electronica scene. This is a bold move but something that pays off in droves, the track works beautifully, using Robertson’s voice perfectly as it seemingly jumps and plays in amongst the well placed decaying folk instrumentation. ‘The Weight of Hours’ is more classic Avia Gardner material, which takes the tape-recorded sound of some kind of zither or autoharp and allows Jenna Robertson to simply sing over the top without any other distraction. This reveals a pleasantly childlike quality not usually evident and opens the album up somewhat, allowing you to suddenly see her in a different light. However, straight after this beautiful, quiet interlude we are thrown headfirst into the distorted electronic funk of ‘Winter’s F*cking Over’. As you can probably imagine this is jarring to say the least, but don’t worry we’re back to the sublime before too long and when we reach the penultimate track, ‘Please Write When You Can’ we hear the record’s peak which again gives Jenna Roberson room to breath and the production keeps as subtle as it needs to. ‘Mill Farm’ is like a glorious antique, the disc you’re looking for beneath piles of dusty relics and in amongst all it’s creaking and groaning there is a beauty pure and simple.