Dais Records (label)
29 October 2021 (released)
29 October 2021
Navigating both the distant and recent pasts to articulate a better future is a popular trope right now. Mining, defining and refining random accessed memories, be they hyperreal, reimagined or virtual, raiding the archives, tapping into the texts, retracing paths to forge new destinations. A remembrance of things passed/past.
Operating between the twin timeframes of twilight, either disco at dawn and/or dance at dusk, Xeno and Oaklander (Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride) return on seventh album ‘Vi/deo’.
The during and aftermath of isolation and alienation last year helped birth this (re)conceptual album, a sustained period of intro and outrospection yielding clarity and insight into both the immediate ‘world’ around, the physical, the tangible and that of beyond the realm of the standard senses. ‘Movie Star’ expertly deconstructs the prose-poetics of the silver screen, the fallacies of intimacy the exalted idol exudes, where seeing is never truly believing.
‘Vi/deo’ is a conceptual album inspired by ideas of synaesthesia (the sensation of ‘experiencing’ music and how it can affect/effect and stimulate ‘other’ senses, e.g. a note can have a colour, a noise a scent, a sense or tactile feeling).
The activation of a sense can kickstart embedded, entrenched recollections, actioning a domino effect of submerged experiences that clatter into the present. In this networked, grid-locked cyber-kinetic world that omits the vibrational properties that human beings emit (thereby negating the exchange of inner turmoil), the call to return back to the land, to be at one with nature grows ever louder. Music of the spheres has the capability to aid this passage, to assuage any fears, to bridge the divide between what was and what could and arguably should be.
This album lovingly derives effervescence, essence and elements from Italo-disco’s vivi per il momento, William Orbit’s Torch Song ensemble (especially on the relentless retrofuturism of ‘Infinite Sadness’ and ‘Rain Garden’), French ye-ye’s joie de vivre (‘Afar’), and the reassuring echoes that analogue synthetique sounds can transmit (at odds with the treated bleatings and inorganic sonics so prevalent today).
The overall result is one of the perception of unknown familiarity and recognisable mystery, the distance between ‘knowing’ and the unknown, depending on your mode of reception.
Where you stand is ‘how’ you understand.
