After spending the ’80s writing dark ambient diatribes and working alongside Nurse With Wound, multi-instrumentalist Robert Haigh took a sharp detour into drum ‘n’ bass with his Omni Trio project, only to resurface under yet another glaringly different guise over the past decade. And that is Robert Haigh the melancholic piano man, a minimalist cut from the same cloth as Erik Satie and Arvo Pärt. Creatures of the Deep is a recent transmission from that realm, a spare listen that does a lot with little and alternates between strangely beautiful and mildly unsettling motifs with aplomb.
“The piano is essentially a percussive instrument,” Haigh explained in a recent Wire interview, “but it’s capable of the most fluid extended voices. It can produce thunderous bass tones alongside the most intimate and fragile top notes.”
Exactly….
