No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

― William Wordsworth, Extract from the Prelude

Every something is an echo of nothing.

― John Cage

Bone Folder’s J Kamboh (bass) and Mat Martin (guitar) first met playing on London’s alternative music scene. Over the course of a year, as their paths would frequently cross and re-cross, the pair began exchanging records and ideas, noticing a unique chemistry whenever they played together. It soon became apparent that they possessed a shared desire to forge an improvised musical language of their own.

Embarking upon a disciplined working regime of days-long woodshedding sessions in isolated locations, they developed a practice built around drone, repetition and an intuitive response to the vast empty skies and rough-hewn beauty of the surrounding landscapes. Here the disparate strands of their obsessions with the NYC abstract expressionists and primitive, long-forgotten folk rituals, gradually coalesced and coagulated until — like Rothko’s Chapel reconstructed from monoliths — Bone Folder heaved itself into being.

In Bone Folder, Kamboh’s organic, untethered bass playing and Martin’s synaesthetic musical instincts converge in improvised explorations of time and space. Explorations rooted in tension and harmonic stasis; instilling a mediative state that fizzes at the edge of melodic fragility; burrowing into the fissures of Gavin Bryars’ iceberg…

Bone Folder’s self-titled debut album, recorded with Sean Woodlock (Moin, Part Chimp) and mastered by Noel Summerville (Godflesh, Merzbow), is a snapshot of the duo’s improvisational process. In a series of single takes, with no overdubs, Kamboh and Martin have created a record of vast and uncanny intimacy that seems to exist somewhere outside time. Sound and space captured in Bible-black amber.

— W.B. Gooderham