It documents a garden installation made last summer, mbira somehow hooked up with various percussion and a turntable – the contraption’s gentle progress only interrupted by a hilarious if panic inducing blast of seagull noise. The side long first track of the tape, out now on Falt, feels like it’s being animated to life by a rusty automaton, the odd lack of steady gravity never irritating but instead moving the composition like waves gently lapping on the side of a boat. Nicholas Langley, who runs the Third Kind label, recorded Mbira Locations 2018-2020’s, elegantly clumsy sway of plonks and thuds in solitude as a routine for relaxation. This is improvised music, not just in the process behind how it was made, but how it feels like a weighty counterpoint to a time when life itself felt like a constant daily improvisation. ‘The Easter Bunny’ is more unbounded, guitar slipping through organ chords before the duo’s voices enter, uniting in soft hums like a morning ritual to hold the anxiety at bay. The forty plus minutes of the track a startling reminder of the beautiful things that can happen when time suddenly becomes a dauntingly limitless resource. ![]() Opener ‘Journey Of The Canada Goose’ has Dawson playing bass and drum machine, hitting a ramshackle motorik like the Young Marble Giants channeling Neu, while Pilkington fires beautiful organ flurries and melodies over the top. This is music as coping mechanism, a playful way of adjusting to new normals of inner and outer, private and public space. Blue Tapes have whittled that formidable discography down to three tracks for Blue Forty, catching some of the brightest rays of light in the catalogue. ![]() At the start of the pandemic they were restless, recording an album a day and releasing them as digital pay what you likes. ![]() Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington’s Bulbils project saw the duo, who are two quarters of space disco synth-pop wonders Hen Ogledd, confront lockdown’s enforced stasis by daily recording jams and improvisations. Jump to 2021 and tapes are continuing to orbit the worlds of self-care and self-help, but with DIY artists sharing their rituals to face the weight of the modern world rather than subliminal messaging.
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