Camila Fuchs—Kids Talk Sun

More than forty years before the signing of the Paris Agreement, Douglas Trumbull released Silent Running. The film predicted a future in which spacecraft abandoned our dying Earth, hauling entire forests with which to terraform new worlds. The aesthetics of its setting, Valley Forge, continue to infiltrate public consciousness today. Geodesic domes, like astral snow-globes; a lonely Joan Baez score. Trees with a backdrop of steel and stars. These are more enduring legacies than the film itself. Silent Running was just one of a number of works that fused tech and nature, a vanguard of the emergent movement of bio-engineering. Nowadays, Neri Oxman’s MIT research group talk about growing buildings from seeds.

Lisbon-based duo Camila Fuchs’ Kids Talk Sun feels like a contemporary rescoring of Silent Running—a Joan Baez album for the age of bioinformatics. A number of stylistic quirks signify this. Some are playful and offhand (like the Strauss-y horns in ‘Roses’ which suggest a celestial setting). Others are more persistent and pervasive.

Camila De Laborde’s vocals—aside from recalling Baez herself—at times resemble Karin Dreijer and Julia Holter, in their balancing of folksy darkness and computer-aided transhumanism. In fact, Kids Talk Sun as a whole shares sensibilities with Holter’s Aviary. Both albums lean into a kind of tropical stickiness—but where the squawking birds on Holter’s album denoted an exterior space, squelches and soft thumps in Kids Talk Sun place us deep in the forest of the human body. Tree sap has been supplanted by warm blood.

To labour Kids Talk Sun with even more comparisons, it shares DNA with Orbital’s In Sides or Matthew Herbert’s Bodily Functions. Beats and production sound retrieved from the sonogram of an enormous animal, rather than composed; dominated by squelchy bass and hisses that mimic the rush of blood through veins. Camila Fuchs bounced between the sea, wilderness, and the studio throughout the recording of Kids Talk Sun—and these contrasting spaces have certainly informed the record’s colourful and varied palette.

Kids Talk Sun feels familiar in all the best ways. If you’ve ever imagined what being given a tour of DeepMind while on psilocybin feels like, it’s probably something like this.

Kids Talk Sun (releasing 13th November) is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Lore City—Alchemical Task

Lore City’s Alchemical Task is a subdued album, woven close in spirit to Leeds duo Hawthonn’s 2018 work Red Goddess. In fact, Lore City share so much of that group’s folkloric DNA, it’s hard to believe they’re from Portland. They sound more like people who wound down from some Cornish side-road, having time-travelled from the English Civil War. Their sensibility feels constructed from pagan apocrypha which predates the existence of their country.

This is most explicitly suggested by floor-tom heartbeats which suffuse the album’s first half with military regularity. Civil War writer William Barriffe described these drums as “the voice of the Commander”, a sentiment which can still be applied outside of a battlefield; they’re drums which drive inexorably forward, and dictate the pace of the album. Likewise, when they’re removed altogether, for final tracks ‘Beyond Done’ and ‘Don’t Be Afraid’, the effect is startling—an album which has marched itself into thick fog to begin a slow disintegration into silence.

Historicity is also pretended at by dreamlike vocals, and a par-for-the course soak of reverb. These hymnal elements are still successful, serving as a pleasant contrast to Alchemical Task’s medieval motorik, but they’re not quite as unique—and at points become dream-pop window-dressing. At their best they imitate the (inimitable) Jarboe, as on ‘Beacon of Light’, which places emphasis on vocalist Laura Mariposa Williams’ wonderful lower register while thinning things out to a stage whisper.

Truth be said, Alchemical Task is difficult to write about—it generates most of its interest from an ineffable place. You can stand and watch the sea for hours at a time, but nobody wants to compare waves against one another. Lore City have created an album which surfs its own hypnotic shivers; into which time and sense evaporate and all you can do is listen, dumbfounded. Quite how everything works so well is a mystery. Perhaps it really is magic.

Alchemical Task is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Echo Collective—The See Within

Echo Collective is the first solo album of original material from neo-classical journeymen Echo Collective. Though their name may be unfamiliar to many, their work is not; past collaborations include Johann Johannsson’s 12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann and Christina Vantzou’s superb N. 4. Throughout the past few years, Echo Collective have made a name for themselves not just as technical masters, but as intuitive, adaptable and generous artists.

If, from that, you think you’ve worked out how The See Within sounds, you’re wrong. It is a delicate, controlled album—but it’s a far cry from the quantised assembly-line beauty of someone like Nils Frahm. It’s miles away from anyone else, too. Echo Collective don’t just get their socks off; they fully commit to an approach which uses no post-processing or production techniques (besides reverb). This doesn’t feel like an appeasement to fetishists of analogue media, shelves overflowing with digitally-mastered vinyl. It instead betrays a love of form, musicianship and experimentation. That the album’s relatively untouched performances feel so tactile is just a wonderful bonus.

In some cases, production on The See Within becomes as compelling to engage with as the music itself—‘Glitch’, as anomalous in the tracklist as its name suggests, sounds like a rank of chattering computer consoles, or a quasi-orchestral rendering of mobile phone interference.

And even when instruments are identifiable, their use is novel enough to defamiliarise. ‘The Witching Hour’ melts away through its runtime into a Shepard tone of descending portamentos, every instrument on the track seeming to wilt as it is played. Even the album’s title feels like a magic trick—substituting one vowel to create a phrase which is both funny and mysterious. In moments like these, The See Within survives the spirit of film pioneer Méliès. The trick is simple, but so much fun you never try to work it out.

The See Within is available for download and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Benjamin Finger & James Plotkin—We Carry the Curse

Claire Denis’ 2018 film High Life saw humankind colonise space with its darkest and most self-interested impulses. The film juggled tenderness and brutality, hope and nihilism—a curious tone which extended into its minimal score, courtesy of Tindersticks alumnus Stuart A. Staples. There is some shared DNA between Staples’ work and the latest collaborative LP from Benjamin Finger and James Plotkin, We Carry the Curse. Both are stargazing music—but they divide their attention between the stars’ brilliance and what Robert Frost once called the “empty spaces” in between.

Black is a yielding, vacuous colour. Many fear the dark because this vacuity accommodates pre-existing fears—if you are terrified of spiders, your imagination may infest a dark space with them. Our minds wander freely before sleep, because in the unobserved darkness of night we need fear no judgement. Music can be the same way—and with We Carry the Curse, vacuity and darkness allow a depth of contemplation that more active forms may not. The album relishes in stillness, cavernousness, and dark mystification. One listener may find the album deeply strange or disconcerting—another may just as easily find hope, clarity and relaxation.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see a huge wave of younger listeners soon turn towards gestural music like We Carry the Curse. A generation seeking self-actualisation may find comfort in art which doesn’t tell you the right or wrong way to think. Not only can you luxuriate in its formal beauty, you are afforded space to undergo your own spiritual/emotional/intellectual journey—rather than be dictated to by more traditional songwriting, often as confused in its affiliations as it is vocal.

There is more than a passing resemblance between We Carry the Curse and A Silver Mt. Zion’s 2000 album He Has Left Us Alone…. Finger and Plotkin’s title track, in particular, evokes the spirit of Efrim & co. with its wounded strings, funereal plod and crunchy guitar drones. We Carry the Curse gets similar mileage from its tension as A Silver Mt. Zion’s work; restless, refusing to boil over but refusing to slow its simmer. Both artists allow the analogue and electric to collide in an uncomfortable clash—generating a spectral bridging effect between the past and the present. It is as though the bows and strings of dead players are calling from the grave. Albeit terrestrial this time, rather than in the far-flung reaches of space, ghosts represent the same vacuum—unseen, and of indeterminable morality. The title We Carry the Curse is really a question in disguise. Into what empty spaces are we carrying it?

We Carry the Curse is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Bardo Todol—Music 4 Strings...

The two sides of Bardo Todol’s Music 4… are distinguished by the instrument which leads them. The basis of side A is a hypnotic and slowly-ululating synth drone (think Éliane Radigue’s ‘Kyema’). Side B is string-dominated, and consequently has a more fragile—but ominous—tone; as though its straining instruments are wound tight enough to implode on themselves. Bardo Todol unify both sides with their use of field recordings, employing a near-constant hiss of running water as the skeleton for their compositions.

Often the boundary between composed and natural elements is fuzzy and dissolute. The result is an enmeshing of landscapes; a collision of natural and unnatural sounds that feels like wandering into the Strugatsky brothers’ Zone. Sounds could as easily be the catcalling of birds as they could alien visitations. Rough-and-ready analogue sources like hurdy-gurdy, violin and flute are transformed beyond recognition through their own interplay, and some supplemental tape effects. It’s a hyper-real album—as tactile as it is preternatural.   

If constricted to a genre, Music 4… is best described as new-age, carrying the torch of composers like Tomita and David Toop. As such, its use of running water feels indebted to decades of tradition. Artists in this field have used water as Taoist shorthand for yonks; it emblemises growth, acceptance, and change, seeking that which is low, and moving with ease rather than force. Bardo Todol use it to create a curious juxtaposition. Instrumental drones hold you in stillness, but the flurrying soundscapes around them emphasise the passage of time.

Occasionally, Bardo Todol break their own spell. Late on side A, the sound of water disappears for a Boards of Canada-style looping melody. It’s a queasily effective moment; almost feeling like a violation or an ad-break. It’s like a spear of clarity has punctured the trance. Side B has a finger-picked, jazzy section which surfaces for scant minutes before being subsumed by the fog again. These moments are the most explicit example of what makes the album so captivating. When you glance at a forest, it looks harmonious and still—but all the while, plants and animals violently contest territory and fight for mates. Similarly, Music 4… is more compelling for its disharmony than anything else, as a multitude of unique voices jostle for supremacy. This album, like the landscape it explores, bubbles with violence, but is all the more beautiful for it.

Music 4 Strings, Sintetizador, Agua, Una Flauta y Electrónika - Vol. 1 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe