Label: Warp Format: CD,LP
Plone are apparently intent on creating timeless electronic melodies; it seems they might have succeeded. For Beginner Piano has ten such examples to offer for posterity, and the spread of influences from John Barry to Lee Perry via the chirping bleeps of their labelmates are evident from the opening tracks “On My Bus” and “Top And Low Rent” onwards. The charming little keyboard melody and vocoder of last year’s single “Plock” slips out the bossanova moves in that retro-Futurist style whch will be one of the defining characteristics of the Nineties for future generations; likewise “Marbles” lets the group show off more of their collection of antique electronics as if they’d been commissioned to re-interpret the Easy Listening spacescapes of days gone by for the Millennium Dome.
This music sometimes resembles an organic growth fed on the decaying celluloid left over from the transfer of a thousand Sixties polo-neck and tinfoil dramas to video; the ghosts of soundtracks to an impossibly optimistic time of plenty of the imagination – reality really had very little to do with it at the time or now – cruising on the joyously naive sounds the earliest consumer electronic instruments produce. Plone have a knack of making their absorbsion into the interplay of these cheap-sounding devices almost transparent; indeed as if the melodies were plucked fully formed from the aether after all.
“Press A Key” brings these elements into a more contemporary methodology, with breakbeat tricks under the spreading bass, and the tartrazine rush of “Bibi Plone” is quite twisted in a manner worthy of Jean-Jaques Perrey, again with a rhythmic flair which marks it being of later origin than might be at first apparent. Still, the cheekily-titled “Be Rude To Your School” has much of the Kraftwerkian about it, as is only to be expected – but with an even lighter touch. Shimmering with the vibrato of a lifetime of dusty circuit boards reinvigorated by the touch of hands which so obviously cherish them like old friends, For Beginner Piano makes for a strangely paramnesiac listening experience.
-Freq1C-
