- Timothy Fairless is a musician and producer who has rocked a bass with alterno mope-rockers Rise Overrun and Scott Spark’s band; he’s noodled out a variety of experimental, ambient and post-rocking sounds with the Ektoise collective and he’s developing a CV full of short film soundtracks. He’s just added his debut, solo EP to the mix. It’s called Measurement and it takes its lead from the soundtracking part of Fairless’ skillset and even more from Ektoise’s moody compositions.

Post-rock, given its epic proportions, seems like it might be difficult to do as a one man band. Fairless seems to handle that on the lengthy opener, Decibel, by approaching each, individual element of the sound in demarcated, even abrupt sections. A long piano melody that sounds like it could have been improvised by The Necks at their most melodiously forgiving, is brutally decapitated mid-tremolo by white noise, which reforms into chittering glitch, reminding the listener why Fairless listed Merzbow among his influences. The industrial noise resolves almost as abruptly, stapled to a loping downbeat pattern on a drum-machine, overlaid with glitch, piano and an increasing weight of other things. Paradoxically, when the sound suddenly erupts into fuzzy, doomish guitar and thrashing drums, it’s actually the most seamless segue so far.

There are, as Fairless points out, further layers still, lying beneath the already complex surface of Decibel and it behooves you to go back and listen more closely for the ambient synth wash and touches of glock adorning the piano work, just to begin with. Further listening might also help digest all the jagged fragments; jury’s still out on that one.

Things get - at least superficially - a bit simpler as we move into the fearsome ambient sighs and howls of Deep North. Icey, tuned percussion intertwines with the deathly ticking of a clock in the foreground. The ambience twists and undulates, eventually incorporating the echoing remains of the sound of a piano and, is that the shriek of a guitar? Before petering out with some prepared percussion - mutated cymbals? The track is simpler and more effective for it.

The groaning weight of ambience that builds massively in From Anchor To Hound, an Eno-esque combination of ambient and post-rock that is - even if it has been round the block a few times - very impressive. Fairless paces himself, dropping into a simple piano melody, before resuming the ascent to post-rock glory, taking in a thoroughly distorted drum solo along the way. The sound dies back into Lumen, another piano and ambience piece, a gentle sigh to finish.

I’ve been a bit bored with post-rock (c’mon Mogwai, do better!), but there’s something gripping about Measurement. A work of depth - even if you ignore the abstract scribblings about time, space and politics that Fairless has left next to every track - there’s plenty to go back and dig through. At its best, those depths are found in the atmosphere of ambient, the rippling, raw power of post-rock and make these tried and tested sounds seem like they’re worth coming back to again.

- Chris Cobcroft.