Billy Fuller is the bassist who built Beak>'s sound from behind the scenes. For years, its four strings were the engine of that minimalist and hypnotic machine, the carpet on which Geoff Barrow and his companions spread their electronic obsessions. With “Fragments”, the musician comes out not with a well-thought-out and refined album, but with a collection of fragments made up of sound notes accumulated over the years and recorded in solitude in his home studio while collaborating with artists of the caliber of Robert Plant, Baxter Dury and Massive Attack.
Sixteen tracks in thirty-six minutes. Ideas that last less than a minute and others that stretch to almost five. Fuller plays everything: bass, drums, guitars, synths, keyboards. The voice appears only in some spoken word passages, like a distant echo that insinuates itself between the instruments. There is no narrative thread, but a cohesion of atmosphere, a sort of soundtrack for a science fiction documentary.
The opener “Rummer” is a declaration of intent: a bass that pulsates on a beat motorik, synth waving like signals from a distant galaxy. It sounds like a theme song for a TV show from a parallel reality, and it is already here that Fuller shows his talent for creating miniature worlds. “Three Blind Mice” goes in the same direction, but with a darker atmosphere, almost like an evening political show. Andy Sutor's drums add a weight that the other songs don't have, and for a moment it feels like you're listening to an old Beak> song.
“Penny Bont” is the track that comes closest to Thom Yorke solo: synth restless, a voice that murmurs meaningless words, an atmosphere that dissolves before becoming something defined. “Whammy” on the other hand is pure noise, the sound of a bassist getting lost in the void, exploring distortion like an astronaut moving away from the spacecraft. It is the most difficult moment, almost unlistenable for lovers of harmony. “Tailgates & Ratchet Straps” is the piece that perhaps best represents Fuller. A spoken monologue, live self-sabotage: “Nobody cares about your band or your bass / Nobody wants an old face that's out of place”. It's the voice of a musician who has spent years supporting others, and who now finds himself looking in the mirror. The video is amazing, and the song is a punch in the gut.
The limit of the album is in its very nature: being episodic. Some tracks (“Something Else and “I Can't”) are just sketched out, as if Fuller had wanted to include everything, without doing the necessary chiseling work. But this is also the charm of “Fragments”, its fragmentation. Fuller is just playing with his instruments, recording what goes through his head between atmospheric and slightly mellow sounds, from which one perceives life in a melancholic and phlegmatic Bristol. A work for sure not for everyone, but if you enter its frequency, you willingly get lost within it.
07/20/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
