Stridently pastoral music encompassing cosmic orchestrated chaos, trip hop beats and pseudo classical meanderings Simon Christophers’ Guilo project produces music of Arcadian beauty and of circadian disquiet, a sound that is two-sided: joyous and disturbing, reverential and playful. Cinematic and enigmatic. Guilos material has always sounded delightfully anxious… ‘Incline Thine Ears’ (2011), Simon Christophers debut outing as Guilo, largely succeeded in channeling the decade’s post-millennium tension into compellingly moody abstractions, later that year flushed on creative freedoms ‘Guitarra’, compiled outtakes and collaborations that contrasted his debuts singularity. Mining similar veins but digging up some rarer ore with the help of cohorts (relationships that he has rekindled and to augment this latest release) - Upon The Ancient Tracks - the third album from Guilo is the first one that feels as if one has been given an invite into a private world of secret thoughts and delicate delights that allows one to forget any perceived plunge into dystopia. Instead the music floats past, via the uneasy space between societal turmoil and internal monologue. Christophers, long a fan of left-of-center music, pulls in sonic references from the vanguard, moving beyond contemporary fashion. Yet for all the music’s heavy structure, it isn’t obviously mapped to a rhythmic grid: It slips and slides all over the place, wheezy melodica feints… synths rise, timbales lead.