MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
SYNTHPOP/ ITALO HAPPY MEALS Apéro (Night School Records) ●●●●● Night School records does it again, with one of the sauciest releases of the year from Glasgow duo Happy Meals. Suzanne Roden and Lewis Cook (aka Mother Ganga, and one quarter of the Cosmic Dead) have entwined minimalist cosmic disco and sultry synthpop
with a Gallic twist on their raunchfest of a debut, Apéro. Opening track ‘Crystal Salutations’ swiftly sets the dimmers down low with a synth-lead and slow Italo build up, with reverbed French-Anglo vocals setting the almost horizontal mood for the following five tracks. The highlight has to be ‘Altered Images’ with its silky keyboards and totally girthy bassline, which would give Mtume a run for their money in the smooth department. They may be a little indebted to the revivalist label Italians Do It Better, with their compilation volumes, or perhaps even Not Not Fun at their poppiest. But it’s a refreshing turn for a Glasgow electronic band to delve so head-first into continental balearic style this successfully while retaining a certain weegie toughness. Perhaps it's bred from the taps aff techno heat of the city’s club scene – but with a more elegant and erudite twist.
Slow burner ‘Visions of Utopia’ dives straight into hallucinatory sci-fi
territory, with its Radioactivity-esque modal keys accompanying Roden’s distant lyrics – making for a brave and oddball departure from the more rhythmic vigour of the rest of the album. This only works as an aphrodisiac before closer ‘Le voyage’ goes drum- machine daft with the catchiest chant of ‘Tokyo, Berlin, Chicago’, just to send you on your merry way. Apéro is a fine intro to one of Glasgow’s best-kept secrets. (Nick Herd) ■ Released Mon 3 Nov.
AMBIENT / MODERN COMPOSITION A WINGED VICTORY FOR THE SULLEN Atomos (Erased Tapes) ●●●●●
It’s hard to know where to start with an album like this, one that simply uncurls itself out of the speakers / headphones with a majestic, enveloping and enchanting ease. Right away, it creates this thoroughly immersive and diaphanous state of blissful wonderment that doesn’t feel like it has a beginning or end, but is simply sui generis and of the moment. It’s wonderfully timeless, solitary music, stark yet still comforting, and able to create a unique stillness; a perception that time is not really passing, but paused momentarily so you can engage fully with the strings, the piano figures, the sparse electronics, and whatever is whizzing about your grey matter. A Winged Victory For The Sullen is the project of composer Dustin O’Halloran
and Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie from Stars Of The Lid, another duo who dealt in similarly grand and mellifluous strings / drone ambience. This, their second album, continues their exploration of contemporary classical composition; it’s at times sombre, exultant, elegiac, profound and always beautiful. It’s the kind of slowly insulating sound that has you ponder things differently. It’s grandiose headphones music that makes you feel alone, small, insignificant but simultaneously offers some brief illumination into a world where you are briefly unburdened with trivialities; it creates a Zen-like, transcendental state of becalmed serenity.
This 11-track odyssey was crafted at the request of Random Dance Company
founder Wayne McGregor who asked the duo if they would score his new work. Given this blank canvas, they have created something fluid, dynamic but also compelling – from the portentous ‘Atomos I’ to the elegance of ‘Atomos II’s celestial climax, to ‘Atomos V’s synth crescendo, there’s mystery and majesty throughout the album. Atomos is deep and reflective, but still easy to engage with and a ready-made soundtrack to moments of sublime inner vision. (Mark Keane)
68 THE LIST 18 Sep–16 Oct 2014
SINGER-SONGWRITER VASHTI BUNYAN Heartleap (Fat Cat) ●●●●●
Vashti Bunyan is a voyeuristic pleasure. She sings like she’s murmuring to herself, like you’re overhearing her thinking out loud while she just happens to be in the same room as the music. ‘I sigh with every breath I’m breathing’, she whispers on ‘Holy Smoke’, and it’s this line that sums up Bunyan’s style – wistful, private, reflecting. There’s something eerily present about her – more than once, I found myself trying to enter the conversation Bunyan is having with herself, as though she were sitting just across the kitchen table. And I don’t even own a kitchen table. Her first album in ten years (after 2005’s Lookaftering, and her classic 1970 debut, Just Another Diamond Day) is 100% pure Bunyan – recorded at home and arranged by herself. Bunyan, who can’t play the piano, also accompanies herself with odd notes and fragments that feel like half-finished thoughts. ‘Blue Shed’, the traditional artist’s lament of wanting a space of pure solitude to create, balanced with the fear that everyone you love will drift away, feels like a scribbled diary entry, a musician’s commentary on embarking on such a solitary project.
She unfurls, song by song, with stories of lost love, found love, love that should have been avoided at all costs. ‘Gunpowder’, a stand-out song even in an album of staggeringly good quality, is a poetic confession of a mismatched relationship where all the singer can do is make things worse. ‘It seems that I can never learn my words / Watching them turn around, burning / Lighting the gunpowder trails that you lay’. This is poetry against a backdrop of music – ethereal sounds that lull the listener into a false sense of security while she dissects her heart in front of us.
This is her last album, she insists. She has finally found that shed – somewhere to ‘Keep my words in the air, padlocked there / For ever and silently out of harm’s way’. (Kaite Welsh) Stream the opening track at soundcloud.com/fatcatrecords/ vashti-bunyan-across-the-water
HOUSE / TECHNO HIEROGLYPHIC BEING & THE CONFIGURATIVE OR MODULAR ME TRIO The Seer of Cosmic Visions (Planet Mu) ●●●●●
He hails from Chicago, Illinois, but don’t confuse Jamal Moss with your regular epochal house producer. Despite an early initiation to electronic music – listening to Ron Hardy at the city’s seminal Music Box club, and giving out mixtapes of his own music to clubbers in the small hours – Moss is just as influenced by the freeform space-jazz of Sun Ra and his Arkestra (who he’s collaborating with for an upcoming LP), and it shows in his ferociously diverse productions. This record is a compilation of his back catalogue (he’s recorded for labels like Clone and Klang Elektronik, but most commonly for his own Mathematics Recordings), and it’s the perfect primer for his sound.
What’s most surprising about the nine tracks on the record isn’t their wilful diversity, but rather how well the collection hangs together perfectly as a set. It opens on the title track, which begins with a thumping bassline that surely wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the dancefloor at Tresor in the early 90s, but Moss takes it to new and thrilling places with a synthesised wind tunnel effect which gives the track a hypnotic funk. Similarly, ‘How Wet is UR Box’ isn’t as abysmal as the title suggests, but still
manages to be a little oppressive in its repetitive crunch. ‘Space is the Place’ calls out Sun Ra itself, a murmuring pocket symphony of glitch electronica, while later tracks like ‘Letters From the Edge’, ‘A Genre Sonique’ and ‘134340 Pluto’ get even deeper into this combination of raw, rhythmic, primal dancefloor afro- futurism and an almost playful experimentation with instrumental melody and jazz structures.
The whole hugely distinctive effect serves to play music with an evocative air of techno classicism and the beats to match, yet one whose structures find plenty of space in which listeners away from the dancefloor will find new sounds to explore. (David Pollock)