Album Review: A Shifting Lightness

There is a place within all of us where our darkness gives way to the light and our sorrows become our rejoicing. It is elusive but wearies not as we journey through life with all of its disappointments. This soothing of the soul can come in many forms, of which music is one of its most potent forms.

Levi Patel dares enter where oft we fear to go and in his inspiration I have found the why of we and the who of me. I hear the calling and it reminds me of what I have forgot, a life less lived is soon forgot.

A Shifting Lightness is true to its word, though one dare not decree what purpose lies behind such sweetness. Simple piano melodies give pause for thought and gentle strings speak of hope and faith in renewal, uplifting the spirit of those who search for meaning beyond what has become meaningless.

If his previous works, the EPs Forms and Of Sleep and Time and the 2017 album Affinity, which yielded As She Passes, a composition which has had more than 10 million streams on Spotify and Soundcloud, were embellished with subtle electronic sweeps and strokes, which have given way to a more organic approach in the classical sense, with the deeply riveting cello of James Bush.

Titles are suggestive rather than directive – Signals Silent, Through Winter Eyes, In Ancient Ways and To Shift In Memories – and it comes as no surprise that they were conceived and birthed at Levi’s home studio in Matakana ”which is half underground, so from where I was writing every day I could only see through a single window above ground”.

The lightness of being is potently encapsulated in A Shifting Lightness. It can only be hoped that Patel will find an audience amongst those who are awakened to their soul (sole) purpose.