Council Meeting Memo #091 — Five for Friday
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales (Warp, Album)
Really wanted to hate on this so bad, but I just can’t. It’s been on semi-hard rotation ever since it arrived. Mark’s production is on point as ever. Which leaves Thom….just depends on where you sit with his vocals really. The tracks where he’s relegated to the ether (like on ‘Ice Shelf’) work best for me. But equally the hits (’Back In The Game’, ‘This Conversation is Missing Your Voice’) also functioned as skewed self-contained pop components. SA. 🇵🇸
Purelink: Faith (Peak Oil, Album)
It’s the right prescription but the wrong dose. PR
Actress and Suzanne Ciani + Natural Wonder Beauty Concept (Live)
Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, London.
Friday 30th May, 2025.
I came for Actress and Ciani… so who’s this support act? A guy in a hoodie on a laptop and a woman walking around singing some of the time. The sound wasn’t great in the Barbican hall, but the variety of different styles in the set and the occasionally Cocteau Twins-like vocals ended up charming me. Other cloth-eared audience members disagreed. I had no idea who the duo were until a friendly guy in the next seat returned from the interval and said he’d been told it was DJ Python and Ana Roxane aka Natural Wonder Beauty Concept. Colour me surprised as I’d been a fan of the eponymous album on its release in 2023 and hadn’t recognised it at all.
Then it was time for the main act who didn’t disappoint. Two largely inert individuals on their laptops facing each other across a tabletop — not exactly riveting, but it’s amazing what you can do with flexible sheets of aluminium foil, wind and dry ice machines, and moving lights. The result at times felt like being in a cave, at other times swimming underwater with sunlight dappling the depths in which we sat. The copious dry ice made me very grateful I wasn’t in the front rows as heads almost disappeared in the artificial mist. As to the music, it was a single, hour plus piece comprising fairly lengthy, gently morphing passages that remained beatless, but were at times fairly intensely rhythmic. Thrumming, billowing parts a little redolent of the Blade Runner soundtrack, sometimes sprinkled with beautiful, melancholic piano motifs. It was very clearly a product of two great musicians working together. I’d love to see a live recording or a studio album version released. CB 🇵🇸
(Totally agree with Colin on his review except for the opening act. I’m clearly one of the ‘cloth-eared audience members’ because other than a couple of tracks. I found Natural Wonder Beauty Concept to be excruciatingly bad — especially that junglist track. So there. SA)
Strategy: A Cooler World (Constellation Tatsu, Album)
Huge fanboy of all things Strategy here, so you’re unlikely to hear me say anything negative about this electronic music professional. Totally loved the spatial playfulness of his earlier album ‘Graffiti In Space’ (the track ‘Message from Ouroboros’ stood out). Dub Techno yes but dispensing with rigid rhythm in favour of dispersed ambience. This neatly follows on from that and nudges into different spaces without deviating from texture or timbre. SA
Minced Oath: Supercede (Countersunk, Album)
Yes, this came out way back in 2017 but thought I’d pen some words seeming as it’s been consistently part of my nocturnal listening routine. We’re talking Improvised ambient analogue synth jams here, sinister-as-fuck but with fleeting moments of shimmering beauty. Opener ‘Gabriel’s Oberheim’ sets the tone with frequencies that really test the low-end. But as the album progresses, its sonic ambitions grow larger…as if it wants to soundtrack something. Also liked the semi-comical names of the track titles. ’38 Petaflops’, ‘Not Without My Spine’ and my favourite ‘But You’re Wearing Lederhosen’ — a reference to the film Trading Places, no doubt. SA
