A Happy Return’s family tape recordings use found sounds and distant voices to craft imaginary worlds out of illusory maps

The warm analogue soundscapes of A Happy Return are worlds in miniature, or rather vast swathes of the imagination viewed in short bursts of time. One moment you may be standing in the middle of a forest during an endless afternoon, the canopy of trees a distant rooftop shutting out the sun. The next you are out in the rain, a neighbour’s garden almost flooded as you and your brother push makeshift boats across a made-up lake. This is a personal record that becomes personal to anyone who listens to it.

Indeed, A Happy Return consists of tape recordings by Mathew Fowler (Jam Money, Bons, Spirit Fest), artist Aimée Henderson and their daughter Agnes Bell. Mat describes the album to me as “a family document of making in our wee home over the last couple of years.” It has been lovingly crafted; painstakingly perhaps, but it feels too organic for that. Aimée’s artwork is as vital to the overall tone and feeling as the cover to any release by The Pastels.

There’s a pastoral aesthetic at play that breathes through nature rather than clinging to specific cultural pasts. Although because the record leans away from the present moment, individual pasts are evoked. Gentle tape loops, found sounds, instruments, crackling electronics, distant voices and nursery rhymes grow in and around one another. Kama Aina and the Geographic label may be considered reference points, but they seem more like fellow travellers. A Happy Return could equally be the soundtrack to a long-lost Oliver Postgate project. Although it is another piece of children’s storytelling that might best convey the overall feeling of the record.

John Burningham’s 1978 picture book Time to get out of the bath, Shirley reveals an imaginary world underneath the bath. Shirley gets small and travels through the pipes to get there. Burningham plays with scale and has Shirley traveling along a pipe in a cross-section that shows the bath and what’s underneath. Next she is seen coming out of a sewer pipe without any further transformation being indicated. Burningham dispenses with having a magical doorway between the two worlds. And it isn’t just a case of reality coming up against the imaginary (although that is the crux of the book), for the imaginary is also that view of Shirley in the pipework beneath the bathtub. The endpapers go even further by combining the space underneath the bath with the other world, competing scales living together in harmony. All akin to listening to A Happy Return.

The vinyl edition includes an insert with sketches by Mat. A particular handwritten phrase can be found among the drawings: illusory maps. It seems to sum up where this record could take you and suggests that when you return home it will not be quite the same.

spillagefete.bandcamp.com

Stewart Gardiner
Latest posts by Stewart Gardiner (see all)