Shelter Of The Opaque

Vanishing is the unique creative project of Gareth Smith, a working class time-served engineer turned artistic world builder who has traded in his toolbox for the means to write evocative music and resonant lyrics. His stunning new album Shelter Of The Opaque seizes quotidian reality and either scrapes away at the veneer to reveal the awful machinery of how things are underneath or overlays it with a gossamer filigree to suggest how they could be instead. The musician - who was born in Hull but now lives and works in Manchester and has worked previously with Lonelady and Gnod - dove deep into his family history on previous albums, 55°N, 5°E (2021) and Ends Without Redress (2023), to tell the story of his great grandfather George Henry Smith who died in the Dogger Bank Incident of 1904 when Russian warships mistook a fleet of British trawlers for the enemy and opened fire. But this time he knew that creative change was necessary. Work started on building the skeleton of the album in 2018 with a session at the utopian cultural space, WORM in Rotterdam, featuring his trusty lieutenant, saxophonist Karl D'Silva (Drunk In Hell) and modular synth player Sam Weaver (Cuspeditions); while strings were added later by Abstract Concrete members Otto Willberg and Agathe Max plus Ecka Mordecai in Manchester. Smith guided the sessions via a series of simple imagistic commands, only adding his vocals after the music was done.