Articles
2011 Artists' Picks
Spotlight 5
Albums
1982
Marvin Ayres
Big Quarters
Birds Of Passage
Brunborg / Huke
bvdub
Charlatan
City of Satellites
Cokiyu
CYNE
Dakota Suite / Sirjacq
Tomoyoshi Date
Dday One
Vladislav Delay
Ensemble Economique
Esperanza
Frost & Bjarnason
Integral
Lullatone
Mario & Vidis
Dean McPhee
Mint Julep
Muhr
James Murray
Muta
Nicholas: Nu Groove
pacificUV
Papir
Andrew Pekler
Pimmon
Simon Scott
Quentin Sirjacq
Stormloop
Swod
szilárd
Tapage
Carl Taylor
Willamette
Boo Williams
Reissue
Pink Floyd
Compilations / Mixes
Marcel Dettmann
Fabriksampler V4
Inertia: Resisting Routine
Tech My House 5
Visionquest
EPs
0311
A Sun-Amissa
Jacksonville
Arev Konn
Neon Cloud
Phasen
Photonz
Rivers Home
Simon Scott:
Bunny
Miasmah Records
A natural step beyond 2009's Navigare, Simon Scott's Bunny distances the Cambridge-based producer even further from any shoegaze associations established by his now long-ago tenure in Slowdive. Admittedly, traces of shoegaze do surface now and then, though in obscured fashion, but Bunny's focus is more on a kind of surrealistic scene-painting rooted in psychedelic rock and sonic collage, with the album's eight pieces unfolding like blurred disturbances welling up from the unconscious. That's never more apparent than during pieces such as “Black Western Lights” and “Gamma” where conventional notions of rhythm are suspended for rippling textural flows of cinematic evocation.
With a mournful wordless vocal as midwife, “AC Waters” rises from the murk and creeps into being amidst spooked-out noise textures and scabrous scrapes and rustlings, the track more collage-oriented than song-structured. Rather more straightforward in construction is “Betty,” which uses a jazzy walking bass line as a springboard for a grime-laden plunge into psychedelic blues-rock that finds Scott's raw guitar wailing like a banshee. The slightly slower-moving “Radiances” likewise gives its psychedelic blues-rock an injection of venom in that what starts out as reasonably conventional material combusts into a black hole of pulsating textures that seethe for minutes on end. With no compromise to textural density, “Labano” brings the intensity level down for a downtempo exercise in lounge jazz, while the initially ear-piercing “Drilla” gradually comes inot focus as a searing shoegaze-cum-blues jam. (The vinyl release also includes a ten-minute bonus track that embeds Scott's guitar textures within an arhythmic flow of ambient hiss and reverb-heavy dreamscaping.)
That Bunny takes some degree of inspiration from David Lynch's work is signified by the title “Betty,” the name of the central character in Mulholland Drive. In keeping with that Lynchian sensibility, there's a smokey jazz lounge quality to Scott's material that's reinforced when the recognizable root sounds of acoustic bass, cymbals, cello, and electric guitars occasionally rise to the surface of the sprawling mass. It must needs be said, however, that, for all its dark intensity, Bunny isn't without a sense of humour, as shown by the choice of album title and the nightmarish sound design given “Honeymoon.”
January 2012