Oliver Cherer

THE TRAINS HAVE GONE: GILROY MERE INTERVIEW

Stewart Gardiner - Concrete Islands

Adlestrop is poetry and poetry is, like the inner and outer landscapes we tread and remake with each heartbeat, simultaneously everything and nothing at all.

Alistair Fitchet - Caught by the River

... gorgeously-pulsing kosmische movements, bucolic neo-classical evocations, hauntological reflections replete with environmental found sounds, mournful end of the pier slow-jazz and spooky abstract folk...

Adrian -Concrete Islands

Interview

...The past in fading layers, visible from the present…

Bob Fischer - The Haunted Generation

.....a patina of aching nostalgia settles on proceedings like so much English seaside fret

David Sheppard - Mojo

....The songs seem half-remembered, like dreams, but are never less than perfectly crafted, and the album hangs together as a whole artistic statement despite the variety of Cherer’s songwriting. And despite its lengthy gestation, it feels like an instant, a snapshot of a rainy afternoon, slightly blurred, mysterious and beautiful.....

Thomas Blake -Folk Radio
Also, Thomas Blake's top ten albums of 2019

...it’s folk music with a few electronics and a slew of great melodies. It sounds like some Canterbury album with vocals that recall (the great) Richard Sinclair of Caravan and Hatfield and the North fame. And, from where I come from, that’s autograph time...

Bill Golembesk -Soundblab

...Softly-spoken vocals and silky sax solos give the record a languid feel – fittingly, nothing here is in a hurry – and it is a record that rewards repeated listens as you pick up more and more of the conversation Cherer is having with his younger self. Revisiting the ideas of youth with the wisdom of age, he has made the album of his life...

Ian Parker -For Folk's Sake

Interview

Tapes in the attic: Oliver Cherer Interview

The omnipresent Oliver Cherer tells all on his sublime old-into-new solo album, I Feel Nothing Most Days, and his chameleonic career to date

Adrian -Concrete Islands

Feature

Rockerilla - Oliver Cherer Interview

A feature article and album review in this long established Italian monthly music and cinema print magazine.

Raffaello Russo - Rockerilla

...A dayin the country, a day at the sea ~ the music vibrates with the certainty of good company and good cheer.  Once in a while, a wordless choir (as at the end of “The Ditchling Beacon”) sings like mice waiting for cheese or white-gloved ladies waving to the bus and serenading their friends as they embark or disembark.  Was a ride on the green line ever anything less than wonderful?  If so, after hearing this album, we no longer recall such a time.

Richard Allen -A Closer Listen

...Many of The Green Line’s songs are miniature rural fantasias, instrumental vignettes of quiet wonder, such as the slightly uncanny Bert Jansch meets Kate Bush pastorale of Cuckoo Waltz, or the beautiful reverie of A Lychgate. But there’s the rumbling motion of the buses here too. The fluttering melody and drum machine heartbeat of Dunroamin’ is bucolic motorik steeped in English melancholia, Cherer mournfully chanting a litany of suburban house names, while the neon synth arpeggios and dramatic piano chords of the title track signal the end of the journey.

Joe Banks -Loudersound.com

 - a beautiful tapestry of sound that is as warm as an August sunset and sweet as a packet of Spangles. To this reviewer, the spectre of Brian Eno is definitely hovering over much of what constitutes the journey on the ‘The Green Line’. Opening track ‘Dunroamin’’ is a slowed down diesel fuelled reinterpretation of ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ (minus the Fripp-tronics) from ‘Another Green World’ refracted through the dreamier moments of Steve Reich and dowsed in that deep sense of contemplative musical humanism that permeates much of Oliver Cherer’s work.

Shaun C. Rogan -A Closer Listen

...a mixture of folk, neoclassical and ambient, gazes wistfully back to the post war years of hope and elation, tinged with the melancholy of a contemporary perspective. ‘The Green Line’ by Gilroy Mere takes us on a journey in the eponymous title’s bus, of a now defunct line. If you have already heard and liked Jon Brook’s “Autres Directions”, another journey album (that time to continental Europe by ferry), then this is a real treasure for your record collection.

Grisly in Klondike -psilowave.com

It’s warm, sensitive and feels somewhat like putting on an old jacket. Even the photography on the artwork gives the impression that the album was recorded in a disused church around 60 years ago and the recording has just turned up in a dusty box.

Cherer’s sound strides the desolate paths previously frequented by the likes of Oddfellow’s Casino and The Declining Winter. Part folk, part understated, it’s a heady mix of acoustic guitars, piano, layered violins and strings. 

Paul Lockett [sic]Magazine

The mood is often heavy, with barely suppressed violence and sexual depravity colouring the air amid the scraping of strings and the forthright punctuation of the piano .... You could even make an argument for the record in totality being a reworking of Lou Reed’s gothic masterpiece ‘Berlin’ translated to a field in Victorian England.

Shaun C. Rogan The Active Listener

Per la seconda volta, tre anni e mezzo dopo lo splendido “Sir Ollife Leigh And Other Ghosts”, Cherer pubblica un lavoro a proprio nome e, come già la volta precedente, si tratta per lui dell’occasione per dare libero sfogo alla sua anima più folk, sebbene declinata tanto nei temi quanto nei modi in piena coerenza con il suo approccio lieve e visionario.

Raffaello Russo Music Won't Save You

Rites and Rituals isn’t a place of small, cramped windows and dusty, stained-glass light. Its doors are open to the outdoors as it walks through a liturgy of ruins, with jagged boulders of old, sacred stone being the only reminder of what was once here. It passes through an empty country lane, stalked by a stark, gnarled family of bare branches, almost regressing into a primal sound while coming across as being extremely contemporary. It was around in the Middle Ages and it’ll be sweeping through the fields of tomorrow. There’s something timeless about it.

James Catchpole   Folk Radio

There is something truly haunted and haunting about Sir Ollife Leigh And Other Ghosts, something both beautiful and at the same time strange and unsettling. On the first encounter with the 11 tracks, the finish of the CD leaves the feeling of waking from a somewhat surreal dream and being unable to return, sifting the images as they fade, trying to grasp the sense of where you have just been.

Simon Holland   Folk Radio

For an album that is concerned mainly with death and darkness there is nothing stuffy or constrictive about Sir Ollife Leigh. The simplest songs are full of space. The short and hopeful Consider Darkness retains its atmosphere with little more than an unpretentious few bars of piano and deceptively plain vocals, backed up by former Hefner multi-instrumentalist Jack Hayter’s viola and Riz Maslen’s backing vocals.

Thomas Blake The Third Ear

A Beard Of Bees If the Tardis spat Edward Elgar out into a Shropshire glade with a Roland DX7, a guitar and no direction home, you suspect that the results would not be dissimilar.

4 stars

Peter Paphides   The Times

...such is the quality of Dollboy's song-writing, it renders A Beard Of Bees a consistent and rewarding listening experience. Imagine the kind of soulful, flowing, home-baked fare found on Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom album and you're nearly there. Sublime.

Flux