Labels: Future Recordings
Review by: Captain Fidanza
When I was about eight years old, someone bought me one of those Bumper Summer Puzzler books with page after page of crosswords, word-searches, masks to cut out, drawings to colour in and cartoons to look at and laugh at. All I remember of that book now, is that one of the pages had a large cartoon of a haunted house in which various ghosts and monsters were hanging out of windows and telling hilarious jokes. Being something of an imaginative child, after a few days of owning this puzzle book, I had somehow managed to convince myself that every time I turned away from the page with the cartoon haunted house on it, the jokes told by the ghosts and the monsters were changing. The effect this idea had upon me at the time must have been quite something because as I sit here now writing this, I realise I am referencing something which took place in the mid 1980s.
A couple of years ago I was in a small, independent record shop in Norwich which used to be called Ray’s CDs and the music playing on the shop stereo was so unusual, I asked that weird kid who’s been working in there for as long as I can remember what it was and he told me it was by an artist called Eluvium. That kid who works in there might be a bit of a smelly weirdo but he’s straight up good people because he sold me a copy of the album “Talk Amongst the Trees” for a fiver, even though it hadn’t even been officially released at the time. That’s why whenever I’m back in the city, I always make a point of going back in there just to see what’s going on.
The album was excellent, it’s mixture of drones, loops and delays always gave me the impression of being dragged down somewhere by sinking sands and every Sunday evening when I used to do the washing up at my then girlfriend’s house, I would play it on her clock radio/CD player combination and allow my brain to be borne back ceaselessly into the past. Thing is, every time I listened to it, it sounded completely different to how it had sounded the week before. Curious.
I spoke to my girlfriend about this curious phenomenon and asked her to listen to the CD a few times during the week and see if she experienced anything similar. She duly obliged and when I next saw her, she was happy to report that she thought it might be time for me to visit a local clinic and have a nice relaxing chat with a very non-threatening man who would be happy to talk at length about the problems I was having and maybe between us we could find some sort of solution to my problems. I never went of course, it was she who was insane, I was perfectly rational and I still am.
Something very similar to the puzzle book haunted house and “Talk Amongst the Trees” took place when I put on this new release from the Futurerecordings label. As with Eluvium, the looping, droning delays are present and the backmasking remains a uniquely unsettling sound; the beautifully staged mise-en-scene of the crackling recording equipment and occasional flashes of radio interference retain the impression that you are listening to something being recorded almost as the artist themself discovers it. It is wonderfully balanced and has the ability to draw you in to its world by showing you occasional glimpses of things you’re not always completely certain you want to see. And every time I listen to it, it sounds different.
I don’t know whether I am just a ridiculous idiot, unable or perhaps unwilling to reign in the imaginative flourishes that got me into so much trouble throughout my long and varied educational career, but I have been simply unable to get a handle on this album since it arrived yesterday. Perhaps it is the rather sterile equipment through which I have been listening to this music which has infused it with this otherworldly quality, but even now, as it plays for the fifth time, it appears to be alive in a completely different way to when I heard it this morning.
In many ways, “alive” is perhaps the single best adjective to ascribe to this album as at times it sounds like a recording of the sound a bacterial culture would make in a petri dish filled with agar jelly, if only recording equipment was that sensitive. Awakening, moving, changing, roaming, progressing, shifting and evolving, never silent, never still, always in flux.
It would be shamefully remiss of me to talk about this album without also speaking about the second half of the collaboration between Eric de Jesus and Minus Pilots. That’s right folks, not only do you get an album’s worth of shape-shifting electronica, you also get a book which the music forms a soundtrack to. To quote from the press release, which has to be unique in underplaying the astonishing quality of the product, the book contains a “long story or a short novella written by Eric de Jesus in Philadelphia.” And quite a piece of writing it is too, with a plain, straightforward narrative stye reminiscent at times of Raymond Carver.
Eric de Jesus and Minus Pilots may indeed not be around here forever, but with work as special as that they have both produced here, surely echoes of something will endure.