Leafcutter John – Yes! Come Parade With Us (Border Community)

Leafcutter John’s latest LP is a walking tour of the Norfolk coast rendered as mossy electronica seasoned with field recordings in a kosmische stew

The sound of footsteps along the pebble beach. Following in the footsteps, the sound but an echo of what has gone before. For it is the legendary figure of Leafcutter John – revealed here as the Tom Bombadil of electronic music – remaking his recent past as the present. He takes our collective hand and walks us into the record. We step with him. Yes! Come Parade With Us is a psychogeographic tour along the Norfolk coast that was his and is now ours. It’s as if he has discovered the means to make real the pastoral virtual reality of Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex and has plunged the listener into this world of his creation.

Leafcutter John’s seventh album – and first for James Holden’s resuscitated Border Community label – is an intoxicating blend of field recordings and modular synth that has warmth seeping out of every pore. It is mossy electronica and kosmische by the seaside – as reflective as it is buoyant.

“Doing the Beeston Bump” feels akin to the organic kosmische call of Glasgow’s Remember Remember. It begins with the crunch of those footsteps, waves washing against the shore as the synth line starts to take hold. Heads fill with images and ideas while walking along, thought processes pulsing to the rhythms of the body and the sea. The growing intensity of the synth suggests an inner journey that is as vivid as the surroundings, but not cut off from them. Drums become the footsteps, keeping everything grounded, yet the cumulative effect is of getting cosmic, as if about to stride off into purple skies.

The title track might be Fatboy Slim translated by Iain Sinclair, the oceanic bleeps mapping out unknowable vistas. The track comes off like big beat completely reconfigured, stripped down and shorn of cheap breaks and embarrassing familiarity, but maintaining that effervescent joyfulness. Things get a little stranger with “Elephant Bones” which utilises masts in the wind to deliver its bubbling sonic pleasures. Here Leafcutter John is a shrinking man traversing physical inner space, the beat of the heart massive and enveloping. “This Way Out” becomes a piece of future hauntology, with the accidental recording of a conversation in a pub already seeming out of time. The track has something of the sepia veil of Boards of Canada about it, a plaintive melody from somewhere else.

Yes! Come Parade With Us is a gracefully organic paean to colourful imaginations expressed out in the open.