Elodie @ Tusk Festival 2014

Listening to the music of Andrew Chalk, you can feel the brushstrokes and their very deliberate place in the piece, the great spaces placed precisely in his sublime minimalist constructions mapped out on a chart somewhere in your head. The designs he creates for the releases on his Faraway Press imprint transform a cd into a small packet of beauty and he weaves the same white magic through his compositions.

Elodie is of course not just Chalk but his ongoing duo with Timo Van Luijk and their music has both a deliberated precision and a feeling of the bald beauty of natural daylight, the stark appeal of cold, unaffected nature. A flute, a tuba, strings plucked, a carefully chosen gram of echo – Chalk and van Luijk are all so absorbed in the sparse but vital details that you can’t help but get lost in it yourself.

For this rare performance, Elodie are expanded into a quartet with the addition of Jean-Noel Rebilly and Tom James Scott (whose recent LP with Chalk, Wild Flowers, you really need to hear). This will be a serene and transcendent start to proceedings at the Star & Shadow on the Saturday.