Darren Pickering Small Worlds – Three (Rattle) (13th Floor Album Review)
With Three, Darren Pickering Small Worlds deepen their exploration of texture and mood, delivering their most cohesive and emotionally resonant album to date. Where previous volumes occasionally leaned toward sketchbook experimentation, Three feels more like a complete suite with each track part of a larger conversation about mood, memory, and place.
There is an immediacy to the playing here, but it’s a quiet one — more like a breath caught in the throat than a declaration. Pickering’s piano, remains the core voice, often stating themes gently before dissolving into soft electronics or the angular shimmer of Heather Webb’s guitar. Bass by Pete Fleming and drums by Jono Blackie provide architecture without insisting on rhythmic dominance, allowing the music to breathe, swell, and recede like weather.
Green Blinking Light sets the tone with dancing keyboard figures and delicate cymbal taps, gradually unfolding into a track that feels like a journey through unfamiliar terrain. A single recurring piano note acts as a lodestar, orienting the listener amid shifting rhythms, percussive bursts, and what sounds like rain hissing into the soundscape. Just when you settle in, it shifts again to travel somewhere new.
What If begins in a discordant rumble before clearing into a sparse, meditative piano-led piece, punctuated by soft brushwork and a shaker’s rustle. It is reflective without being passive. It could be called ambient, but not in the background-music sense. Instead, it feels like a drifting internal monologue, circling around questions that never quite resolve. Each time it appears to settle, it pulls away to the next phrase or texture.
The bird-referencing Tauhou Waltz echoes the darting liveliness of the Silvereye. With brushed drums, increasing keyboard energy, and shifting interplay between synths and percussion, the piece moves as if through a dense, layered, and evolving forest. It stretches past the seven-minute mark but feels like it finishes too soon, spiralling out in a delicate unravelling.
Soft Life opens with what sounds like alien shimmer, the gentle tapping and bright synthesiser sparkles suggesting an otherworldly calm before a deep, slow drumbeat brings a sense of foreboding into the mix. The contrast between brightness and unease creates a tension that never quite resolves, like a conversation between opposing forces that agree to coexist rather than resolve.
The haunting Hjartdal, named after a rural Norwegian municipality, begins in static and rumble, before opening into forward-driving drums and piano. The intensity builds gradually, evoking a landscape of cold air, long views, and strength. There core of this track is a geography defined by rhythm.
Randall is perhaps the most cinematic of the set, beginning with isolated piano notes before shifting into layered percussion, synth, and eventually a celebratory groove. It is a shapeshifter: at times glacial, at times grooving, with icy synth layers and fingers dancing across the keyboard. The title, meaning “wolf shield,” seems apt as there is something quietly mythic about it, protective and wild at once.
Taylor Time begins with a repeated piano motif that twists and turns, then a hissing comes and goes, along with lightly tapped percussion. The motif morphs into an electronic pulse that pulls you forward, while the shifting percussion keeps you slightly off balance. Drum breaks pepper the final two minutes, suggesting closure that finally arrives gently.
At first, Folly is quiet and sombre with sounds blending to create a feeling of inquiry, and then experimentation. Moments of stillness punctuate shifts in tempo, and the latter part of the track is dominated by some intricate guitar work by Heather Webb, before closing out with an exploration of a range of textures and modes. By the end, the piece is joyful and expansive.
Push Bliss closes the album with an ambient soundscape of layered synthesiser tones, creating a sensation of calmly floating away.
Three asks questions about mood, memory, and place. It doesn’t answer them, and that’s one of the reasons it’s worth returning to, again and again. It sits somewhere between jazz and ambient, taking elements of both to create powerful textured soundscapes that reward attention.
If you get the opportunity to see and hear this live, take it.
John Bradbury
Darren Pickering Small Worlds – Three
Release Date: 30 April, 2025 – Available from the RATTLE WEBSITE as a Print-on-Demand CD or Digital Download and on all major download and streaming platforms.
