Vic Mars - Inner Roads And Outer Paths

Clay Pipe Music - LP

UK, 2019

Ambient / Folk / Pastoral

Vic Mars is the kind of artist whose music will probably not change much throughout their carreer, and won't go out of fashion neither. Not that it has ever been really fashionable. It has the eternal quality of familiar background music - video games, TV documentaries, and various kinds of muzak. That being said, it's a specific type of background music, not easy to pin down but highly related to the British sceneries and media environments it's inspired by: BBC heritage programs, and the rolling green hills of Hertfordshire - Vic Mars's homeland.

It has the soothing qualities - hypnotic even - of John Berger's Ways of Seeing series for British television; probably inspired by 1970's cultural productions, but the kind that connected their present time with time-transcending ideals of Arcadian Britain and British folklore, summoning John Piper's paintings and Vanessa Bell's interiors. I could also mention Vic Mars's virtuosity, the large variety of instruments used - hard to say whether some are acoustic or digital ones - and the quality of the arrangements, but all this doesn't seem to matter much in regard to the overall unpretentious beauty of the record. (NM/NM)