Low Company / UK / 2019
Smudgy existential electronics / pristine minimal jazz with a furtive, fugitive feel…the sound of seeing out your retirement in some anodyne lakeside spa resort, nailing endless schnapps to ward off memories of that unspeakable (but accidental, you swear it!) crime you committed thirty years ago. Think Dirk Bogarde in Fassbinder's Despair - the fuddy-duddy psychopath. It's a creepy, brown-carpeted, Cold War-ish mise-en-scene, created with a wonderfully peculiar chamber/sampler palette - keyboards, double bass, vibraphone and rigid drum-machine tick-n-tock, a perfect marriage of fluency and stiffness, of all-pervading paranoia and carefully-portioned camp (Kraftwerk in The Red Room?). Romance too - 'Djurgardsgatans Ogonblick' and 'Jag. Mitt Kaffee' for us are some of the most beautiful, tear-jerking ambient ice-shifts of all time. First vinyl edition (comes w/ download) of this pulpy but curiously moving 2005 CD-R curio and all-time personal favourite, produced by Karl Lukas Petersson and originally released on Strange Life. Dream come true to be putting this out - highest possible recommendation!