Matt Elliott - This World Is No Place For Children Matt Elliott

Since the mid-1990s, British composer Matt Elliott has been exploring sonic textures and pushing at the boundaries of sound.

Bristol came first. Elliott played with Movietone and Flying Saucer Attack before striking out on his own as The Third Eye Foundation.
His debut album, Semtex (1996), was followed by a deal with Domino, which released three further records: Ghost (1997), You Guys Kill Me (1998) and Little Lost Soul (2000). Post-rock? Dark, haunted electronica? Baroque trip-hop? Labels, categories and scenes sit uneasily with the shadowy, troubled atmosphere of Elliott's music. Perhaps "ghost rock" comes closest to describing it.

Nancy came next. Elliott settled there in the early 2000s and began releasing albums under his own name in collaboration with Ici D'Ailleurs. Drinking Songs (2005), the first installment of a trilogy, was a brooding dark-folk record that brought him an ever-growing international audience. Matt Elliott has since recorded nine more albums under his own name, as well as two further records as The Third Eye Foundation, establishing a place entirely his own within the musical landscape.

Matt Elliott's music crosses borders and draws freely on traditions from across countries and continents. Its many strands include Delta blues, the dark jazz of basement clubs, the raw soul of Portuguese fado, Greek rebetiko and the music of the Balkans, with its mingled exhilaration and ache.

This World Is No Place for Children, Matt Elliott's tenth studio album, opens with a deceptively jaunty waltz. Listen more closely, however, and the song reveals itself as the story of a toxic relationship coming to an end. Elsewhere, the album ventures into some of humanity's bleakest territory: boundless greed and our collective failure towards the young. Yet, as so often in Elliott's work, a glimmer of light finds its way through the darkness. These songs can sound like laments or pagan prayers, but they also offer solace. A delicately plucked classical guitar, Matt Elliott's low, gentle voice, at once intimate and distant, an elegiac saxophone and strings that seem to belong to another age: this is music with an immediate, physical pull.

After twenty years of support from Ici D'Ailleurs, to whom due tribute must be paid, This World Is No Place for Children is Matt Elliott's first album to be released by Talitres.