A mid-season round-up of releases from Great Panoptique Winter, Sula Bassana, Listening Center, Stellarays and more

After straining to keep up with the sonic produce overload of last year, this column is aiming for a slightly ‘less is more’ dietary approach across 2024. But before we can properly begin afresh, this first edition of the new annum also picks through a handful of notable leftovers that arrived too late for full digestion in 2023, alongside some fresher foraging finds.

Having treated us to the bleakly beautiful Really Early, Really Late in early-2023, heading-up The Declining Winter, Richard Adams reunites with Panoptique Electrical’s Jason Sweeney for a second album as Great Panoptique Winter, on Greece’s ever-fecund Sound in Silence boutique enterprise. The resultant thirty-minute This Time Alone, conceived through remote file-sharing between Adams’s UK in winter mode and Sweeney’s Australia in summertime, further stretches the former’s elegiac lyricism and hushed tones across wider and often ethereal electro-organic soundscapes.

Thus, through the plucking pulsations of “You Were There”, the synthetic ghostliness of “Range Signs”, the aptly anointed atmospherics of “Wrapped in Grey” and the Four Tet-meets-Art of Noise fusions of “Soft Hands”, the twosome have delivered a deeply cocooning collection of spectral songcraft that should strongly satisfy their mutual followers.

In a similarly melancholic headspace, but funnelled through a less weighty, more unplugged and vocal-free filter is Aamut Kirjastossa (Objects Forever) from The Leaf Library’s Matt Ashton, under his solitary Sun Drawing alias. Built with borrowed instruments – in a free recording space within Helsinki’s well-resourced public library’s no less – the ten gathered largely short pieces are reflective and largely calming affairs.

Configured around combinations of piano, acoustic guitar and field recordings, there’s an intriguing mixture of the left-field folk and chamber music flavours that once infused into some works from 90s post-rock pioneers. This translates into recalling the guitar-less interludes inside Mogwai Young Team, the rustic communalism of Pullman, the meditative tranquillity of Aerial M’s eponymous mini-album and other likeminded contemporaneous offerings.

Overall, when aired amidst the cold and murk of January, Aamut Kirjastossa proves to a subtly uplifting ray of warming light.

From another – entirely electronic – angle comes the last part in the Listening Center’s recent trilogy of micro-self-releases, in the shape of Now, Beyond the Dream (Temporary Tapes). With last year’s preceding Past The Clocktower, The Walled Garden and Exteriorizations having already raided this writer’s suitable adjective stocks to describe this particularly mesmeric minimalistic beats-free routing for David Mason’s solitary journeying, it’s a little hard to comment on this collection without lapsing into repetition.

Yet certainly, if you enjoyed the synth-shaped balmy ripples, circling burbles, miniaturised orchestrations and ambient stretches of its two esteemed prequels, then you will have no complaints with this latest senses-submerging suite, which essentially supplies more of the same in high-quality fashion.

Flipping once more through Dom Martin’s reliable A&R Rolodex to the section reserved for latter-day German experimental explorers – that has served his successive record labels particularly well over the last decade or so – brings us to the first Feral Child album outing for Sula Bassana, the solo-project of one Dave Schmidt (present/past member of Zone Six, Electric Moon, Minerall et al. as well as the curator-in-chief behind Sulatron Records).

Comprised of two side-long vinyl cuts, Reisen steers into the proggier avenues of vintage 70s kosmische, through the deployment of Farfisa organ, mellotron, synths and drum machines, as well as an imposing eulogy-minded mood.

Hence, “Shushie’s Reise” moves through neo-classical symphonics, prowling gothic grandeur, fizzing motorik and a gnarly psych-rock denouement, whilst flipside “Helga’s Reise” glides, swells and swirls across retro-space-age expanses towards an irradiated coda. Best spun with eyes closed, this is head-trip music with potent immersive properties.

On more earthbound – albeit elevated – terrain is Winter Resort Music (Castles in Space), the third album from Portugal’s still somewhat mysterious Stellarays. It captures the trio finding a middle way between the kaleidoscopic art-pop of the still-remarkable Cosmopollinators and the more impressionistic all-instrumental L’Orchestra Pop Le Stelle (both dispensed back in 2021), whilst bringing in nostalgic nods to memories of watching winter sports on TV.

Whilst, somewhat sadly, the enigmatic vocals deployed on Cosmopollinators reappear only sparingly (notably on the gloriously deadpan-sung chugging delights of “VHS Avalanche Film Crew” and loungey Dots and Loops-era Stereolabisms of “Cocktail Alptina”), there are some seriously sumptuous sounds on display as compensation.

Which means spoiling us with après-ski wooziness (“Sun Deck”); the cycling fixations of Kraftwerk’s Tour de France Soundtracks swapped for the slopes (“Ski-Documentary Theme” and “Téléski Solaire”); pastoral Vic Mars-like meanderings (“Winter of Love”); evocative library music (“The Chalet Cafeteria”); radiant antiquarian Radiophonic Workshop electro-doodling (“Tropical Ice”); and percolating early-Polytechnic Youth sparsity (“Fun at the Cable Car” and “Thin Ice Skating”).

All wrapped-up in eye-catching Nick Taylor artwork, Winter Resort Music is a sublime and paradoxically thawing enclave to help us get through the otherwise wearying and weather-beaten long path to spring.

Bringing things into a more bucolic parochial place is Bromham (Woodford Halse), ostensibly the first official solo album The Central Office of Information’s Alex Cargill, trading under rather formally as Alexander R. Cargill Esq.

Whilst the synths and other electronics from his other primary guise remain part of the toolkit, they also are joined by guitars, theremin, melodica, organ and harmonica, as Cargill pleasingly pushes himself into different directions, in a quixotic homage to the Wiltshire village that gives the collection its name.

Consequently, the most embraceable charms of this latest Cargill-conceived collection come through some wonderfully warped Durutti Column-meets-Delia Derbyshire compositing (“A Word from the Chairman of the Parish Council”); smeared salutes to early-Cocteau Twins (“The View to Roundway Hill”); jaunty yet eerie parish fete settings (“48 New Road”); and languid lo-tech nods to Pink Floyd’s interregnum years soundtrack work (“Up Church Hill To St. Nicholas Church” and “The Village Shop”).

Bundled attractively into one of Woodford Halse’s nicely-upgraded CD packages, Bromham deftly breathes fresh life into the esoteric English psychogeography industry.

Adrian
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