Leafcutter John
The Housebound Spirit

The British Leafcutter John has a totally uninhibited conception of sound, not hesitating to mix in this album elements as heterogeneous, multifaceted, and contradictory as one could imagine in an experimental electronic record, yet it sounds light without truly being so.
 
"The Housebound Spirit" was released in 2003 after a four-year gestation. Reading the booklet, it would seem to be a work divided into 15 tracks (54 minutes of music). But the division into tracks is virtual because when listening, one faces an almost uninterrupted sonic continuum, with only three or four brief breaks. There is instead an incessant transition from one cue to another, from an idea that barely gets hinted at to being quickly attacked and replaced by a competing musical phrase.

The album is essentially instrumental, but often quirky vocal interventions erupt into the musical fabric, freely shifting from Leafcutter John's own voice to a sampling of the Swingle Singers. Samples and electronic sounds pervade the record from start to finish, but here in "House or a Soul," a voice emerges alongside the melancholic accompaniment of acoustic guitar and accordion.

This is "The Housebound Spirit," the portrait of a spirit shut inside the house like our Leafcutter, real name John Burton, facing the ghosts that haunt him - agoraphobia and the subsequent panic attacks - pouring them into this work: a hodgepodge brimming with refined and meticulously crafted sounds, where the electronics are so savvy that they effortlessly welcome the quirk of a recorder or clarinet, and where, despite the mentioned sonic eclecticism, the listener is compelled to recognize an intimate coherence of the musical material and its organization.