Salty Brine: How Strange It Is – Summerhall
Weird, uplifting, heartfelt.
Salty Brine does not simply perform an album. He takes it apart, rummages around inside it, follows its obsessions down unexpected rabbit holes, then somehow puts the whole thing back together again in front of us.
And this particular concoction is no overnight creation, this one has been marinating in Brine for the best part of a decade, part of Salty’s long-running Living Record Collection, in which numerous albums become the starting point for something altogether more theatrical, personal and peculiar.
The album at the heart of this one is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, released in 1998, a record whose strangeness and relative unfamiliarity turn out to be one of the show’s great strengths. Unless you are already a...