Modularfield is continuing its exploration of contemporary German electronic music with a couple of vinyl releases, both in beautifully executed sleeves by label boss Markus Scholz and on lovely white vinyl.
First up is Panic Girl‘s Cake On Jupiter, a perfect title for the solitary joy contained within. Opener “Himalayan Tea”, with its slow ring of organ and heavy beat-like boots dragging through empty spaces, sets the mood with violin and nylon guitar sketching a pastoral haze of something distant and ill-defined, lit by hazy sunlight.
It moves as if in a dream, swaying gently, lugubrious and lush spilling into the more Latin-infused “Morning Coffee In Tokyo”. It is still hazy, but the found vocals evoke the arrival at some distant airport, tropical scenery shimmering in the afternoon sun. The synth bass lends an air of mystery, underpinning the other sounds with a sense of adventure.
When Martha Bahr‘s voice appears on “Monotones”, it croons gently, the sense of lullaby strengthened by the soporific, mechanised beat. There is something dreamlike about the whole vibe here, like a curtain across reality with the voice gentle and unassuming in your ear. There is a hypnotic simplicity to the delivered beats that allows more focus on the half-heard voices and growls that appear here and there across the tracks, a liminal state between the familiar and the mysterious that entices as much as it warns off. The second side opens with a jumble of sounds, all beat-driven with a dreamy vocal loop. There is gauze over everything and the steel drum feels . The beats are the only things solid. All else is mis-heard or half remembered, stuck in a backwater, abandoned, searching half-heartedly for a way out, but not really trying to hard as the intoxicating atmosphere gradually overwhelms. Dragging metallic footprints and what could be pigeon noises infect the clever build-up of “Red Stars” and the voice insists on staying just out of reach. Echoes of earlier sounds pop up like cameos tying the whole album together, with fuzzy strokes being the only dissonance to this general idea.There is a yearning in Martha’s voice that is reminiscent of Julee Cruise, and this is most apparent in the final track “Windwalker”; but where Julee dabbles with the darker elements, there is none of that darkness here. Instead there is ease and gentleness with just the faintest sense of loss or of searching for something. The whole thing is playful and rather lovely, and while the cake denotes a sense of comfort, the idea of consuming it on the distant giant Jupiter lends it a melancholy air.
-Mr Olivetti-
