Vini Reilly returns after more than fifteen years with a record that moves further into the unperturbed and unpretentious, made after strokes that should have silenced his guitar.
David Toop once said ambient music is more like a smell than a sound. On Renascent, the first Durutti Column album in over fifteen years, Vini Reilly takes that idea somewhere tactile and unforced. The record doesn’t announce itself. It settles.
Reilly is 73 now. A series of strokes had, by any clinical measure, compromised his ability to play. Yet Renascent exists not in spite of that, but partly because of it. The music has been pared back so completely that form and texture become indistinguishable. What might once have been melody is slowed until it functions as atmosphere. What would have been structure is stretched to a thinness that lets the spaces between notes do the work.
There’s no grand narrative surrounding this release. No marketing campaign, no comeback arc. Just a quiet, late-career statement from a musician who has never much cared for the centre of attention. The Durutti Column’s early output on Factory Records mapped an idiosyncratic path between post-punk and a kind of guitar-based ambience. Renascent continues that path, but it feels less like a return and more like the logical next step for someone no longer interested in separating song from drift.
It’s a record made by a player who has learned how little sound is actually needed. That restraint is the point.
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ROMBO Editorial Staff
The collective voice behind ROMBO Magazine’s news, reviews, features, and cultural coverage.
