Francis Plagne Into Closed Air

With Into Closed Air, Francis Plagne returns to the songcraft that's been the bedrock of his music since his debut, 2006's Idle Bones. Since then, Plagne's music has see-sawed between a particular, parsed kind of art song and explorations of homemade musique concrete - though to see these as distinct practices understates Plagne's capacity to layer and fuse these two tranches of his music making. This capacity has reached its deepest articulation yet on Into Closed Air; for those who've been following Plagne's music over the past two decades, through nine albums on labels like Black Truffle, Penultimate Press and Horn Of Plenty, or on his concurrent collaborations with Andrew Chalk, crys cole, James Rushford and Joe Talia (in Food Court), and Julian Williams (in The Inevitable Orbit), this won't necessarily be a huge surprise. What is remarkable about Into Closed Air, however, is its duality of summation and variation, the way it ties a bow around the music Plagne has already made and suggests new ways forward.