Rudi Arapahoe – False Self

The concept behind Rudi Arapahoe's new album False Self is an interesting one, especially to anyone curious about the grey area between composition and improvisation. As detailed in the album's liner notes, Arapahoe used the SuperCollider programming language to create "an algorithmic musician designed to compose and play alongside my true self". The results were then used as a springboard for further improvisation, composition and performance of the musical information by human musicians on keyboard instruments, tuned percussion, bass flute and bass clarinet. The results are otherworldly and beautiful.

The six pieces, ranging from six to ten minutes in length, are decidedly eerie in atmosphere, hovering like phantoms unsure of their next life. The song titles 'Mechanical Mask', 'Petrification Phastasy' and 'Ice Carnival' offer a vivid glimpse of the soundworlds mapped out and available to explore. Sustained tones bleed out into '80s reverb. Struck metal shimmers and blooms. The spaces between the sounds are as important as the sounds themselves.

For some, this will probably fail to register as music, or will test the endurance like water torture. It's certainly firmly in the abstract ambient camp, yet I find there's just enough musical connectivity between these sounds to lead me, rapt, across this chilly chasm. 

False Self is available now to download on a pay-what-you-want basis via Music Glue.

Wild Beasts – 'Sweet Spot'

As if to put paid to any speculation that they've abandoned guitars completely on fourth album Present Tense, Wild Beasts' new track 'Sweet Spot' deploys both guitars and synths in a sensuous, slowburning way, gently ramping up anticipation of the album's release at the end of this week.



What makes Wild Beasts so good is all over this song: the interleaving of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming's distinctive yet beautifully complementary voices; arpeggiated guitar parts that simultaneously suspend the song in place and twirl it elegantly; the nagging sense that the song will serve as a small yet essential part of the bigger picture to come. In itself, it doesn't really go anywhere radical, but the subtle melodic pirouettes behind Fleming's voice and the cascading vocal harmonies are rather elegant and lovely.

What I am cynical about, however, is the deployment of synth. It's nothing too egregious, but it feels a bit anticlimactic given how recent interviews with the band have highlighted their eager adoption of synths on the new album. The tone of the synth in this track feels a bit flat, and features too prominently in the mix – and the song stops abruptly after the synth hints at a new direction towards the song's conclusion. Sadly, Wild Beasts appear to be the latest in a long line of guitar bands waxing rhapsodic about the inspirational power of the synthesizer and how it enlivened their compositional process. The question of whether it works for them will be answered once Present Tense is released. But is this synth rite of passage something that every band has to go through, even a band as singular and seemingly abundant in inspiration as Wild Beasts?